Google LLC today started opening access to Search Generative Experience, or SGE, an experimental version of its search engine with generative artificial intelligence features.

SGE is available through a software testing program called Search Labs. Users can sign up to participate by clicking the Labs button in Google’s mobile app and Chrome Beta, a version of Chrome that provides access to upcoming features. The Alphabet Inc. unit will notify users by email when they receive access to the program.

Introduced at Google I/O this month, SGE is a version of the company’s search engine that adds a new panel to query results pages. The panel appears above search results and contains AI-generated text. It also includes other elements, including a tool for asking follow-up questions.

If a user searches for information about a certain travel destination, the SGE panel can provide a detailed natural language overview of the location. Moreover, it lists the websites from which the information was sourced. A shortcut below the text enables users to ask AI-suggested follow-up questions or write their own.

Google says SGE can answer highly detailed questions. A user could, for example, ask the AI to compare the features of two similar products from the same company and suggest alternatives. When processing product searches, SGE not only surfaces merchandise that meets the user’s description but also highlights factors to consider before making a purchase.

“The new generative AI powered Search experience will help you take some of the work out of searching,” Google executives Soufi Esmaeilzadeh and Srinivasan Venkatachary wrote in a blog post. “So instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself, Search now can do some of that heavy lifting for you.”

SGE is only one of several experimental features that users can test through Google’s Search Labs program. The program also offers access to Code Tips, a generative AI tool designed to answer programming questions. Another feature, Add to Sheets, allows users to sync a search result quickly to a spreadsheet.

Alongside SGE, Google is piloting a chatbot service called Bard that competes with OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. In conjunction with the announcement of SGE at Google I/O earlier this month, the search giant expanded the availability of Bard to 180 countries. The company also shared new details about the technology behind its generative AI features.

Bard is powered by PaLM 2, a large language model described as more capable than Google’s earlier neural networks. It answers questions that require reasoning with higher accuracy. Moreover, Google says, PaLM 2 is more hardware-efficient than its earlier models. 

Image: Google