Enhanced Search: Google Introduces New Features to AI Search and Google Photos

0:00Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about some big new features out of Google as far as their AI and some ways that they're now integrating AI into a number of products that I believe have a really big big for a big you know it's a big for a big for a big you know it's a big for a big for a big just launched three months ago, right? It's essentially in response to ChatGPT. And originally, ChatGPT had browsing in it, and they took that away. But, you know, Google was worried that people were just going to use ChatGPT instead of Google for getting answers to things. So they decided to integrate AI into their search experience.

0:45It hasn't been rolled out globally per se, but the US and a lot of other areas do have this. And I believe, you know, actually, I think it does have a pretty wide rollout aside from Canada, where I currently am for the summer. so it's kind of been a bummer for me not being able to experiment more with that at the moment but I'll get it in a very short amount of time. In any case, this is something that was just rolled out three months ago and it was designed to enhance how users interact with and digest web information. So the focus of these updates that they've just announced now is to essentially ensure that users can understand complicated concepts, boost their coding, and also optimize their browsing experience.

1:26So here are the new features that they have introduced to the tool. Number one is preview definition and related imagery. So users can hover over specific words to view definitions and related images or diagrams. Very, very interesting. This is specifically handy for topics in, you know, STEM economics, history, and a lot of others where, you know, someone's going to come across a lot of unfamiliar terms or ideas. And I think this is kind of similar to Bing chats feature, which essentially lets you, you know, highlight text and directly engage in a conversation about it. I'm not sure which one I prefer at the moment, but definitely not something completely, you know, revolutionary, but something that is very, very useful.

2:09And of course, Google has the biggest user base. So it's going to be seen by the biggest audience. The second thing is that they have enhanced support for programmers. So for those leveraging SGE for coding assistance, the update really brings a color-coded syntax highlights. I think this is really useful for a lot of developers. I think this is going to provide clarity when trying to discern between keywords, comments, and strings in generated code. So given that SGE already supplies AI-generated overviews for programming queries, I think this added feature is going to help, you know, just further streamline the coding process.

2:45The third thing they have added is AI-powered browsing assistance. So the SGE's integration while browsing is a particularly interesting enhancement, in my opinion. I'm currently in the experimental phase in Search Labs. It's available on the Google app for Android and iOS and will soon be on Chrome's desktop version. So what is the, you know, what's the point of this? Essentially, it's trying to enable users to better navigate and interact with long form web content. So for instance, users can tap to view an AI curated list of key article points and even get, you know, directed to the section they're interested in.

3:22This is so interesting. As someone that has been working on websites for the last, you know, 15, the last, yeah, almost 15 years now, you know, something that's very popular is that we would have like anchor text, essentially, you know, like a table of contents at the top of a really in-depth long article that you could click on and it could pull you to the exact point of the article that you're interested in. Now, this is something that was a nice to have. It was great for SEO, something that, you know, a lot of us would strive to do, but definitely not something that was like industry standard.

3:54And so having this like completely built in with AI, I think is really amazing. So, you know, they're going to be adding it to a section, it's going to be called explore on page. And that option is going to provide users with insights into questions answered within an article. So although Bing chat has a similar feature, I think we're seeing a little trend here. Anytime Bing chat comes out with something new and interesting, Google's definitely gonna be the first to copy it. They don't want to get left behind. But I think Google's solution really emphasizes AI driven efficiency. So I think it is, I think it's pretty, pretty cool.

4:28So Google has clarified some boundaries for this tool. So AI won't summarize paywalled articles, and publishers retain the option to block the feature for their paywalled content, right? This makes a lot of sense. It was the same problem that ChatGPT was having where essentially you could throw a link in to ChatGPT with a plugin that allowed it to scrape the internet with the browser plugin and say, hey, summarize the article on this link. People were grabbing links to paywalled articles and ChatGPT was summarizing them or, you know, just straight out copying and pasting them. And so people were able to get access to paywalled content, which was, you know, really unpopular for news organizations who are, you know, the loudest, the loudest in this field to criticize that.

5:11So they pulled off the entire web browsing plugin because of that. And so I think Google definitely doesn't want to have the same kind of controversy, the same sort of issue. So they have, you know, made a very clear right from the beginning that if it's paywalled, it's not going to get touched. So people aren't going to complain about the use of ai in summarizing and enhancing text comprehension comprehension isn't right exclusively google's instagram's co-founder under the umbrella of the news reading app artifact launched an ai summary feature in their april 2023 update so right like way way earlier this year but for those that are really eager to test some of these capabilities sge's browsing feature is available as a standalone experiment in Search Labs.

5:55So if you're already part of the SGE, expect an automatic rollout. I think it's worth noting that these are not the only new things from Google's SGE. Recently, they introduced a feature which is for displaying videos and images aligned with a user's search queries. So for those that are interested in exploring these enhancements, Search Labs is accessible via the Google app on Android and iOS, as well as Chrome and on desktop. The second big story that I wanted to talk about today is, it seems like a small feature, but essentially, if you've ever used Google Photos, you'll know that at the top of Google Photos, they have like, they have like a bunch of recommended pictures, they try to make these little slideshows for you that's like a year ago, and it shows you like a vacation you took a year ago, and it or some, you know, cute pictures of your kids in the backyard, or, you know, a romantic getaway you did, whatever.

6:44So you're able to kind of tap through some photos from some sort of event that happened in the past. So Google apparently is adding a scrapbook like memories view feature to Google Photos. So it's like making little scrapbooks of some sort of event, activity, some camping trip. And so you can kind of make like a scrapbook about it. But in this feature, people found embedded the ability to label the feature or label this, the scrapbooks, the pages of the scrapbook with AI. And this is kind of interesting. It's not like this huge revolutionary new thing but i think the reason i brought it up is because i think this is very interesting in the industry i think we over i think we we might underestimate the way that ai will literally be integrated into every single software tool um in the future so anytime you're using a software you have to like label the document you have to like type anything there's going to be ai tools that are offering to put in the content for you in every single way possible and of course you know a lot of people want to may want to do it themselves may want to do their own custom stuff but like instagram captions you know youtube descriptions youtube video titles like any google product definitely is going to be heavily integrated with ai i wanted to bring that up because i think that is an interesting thing i will i think we'll definitely see into the future so definitely an area that will be interesting to follow and watch