Google Search Generative Experience Gets Quality Updates & Massive Speed Boost

Google has released its first set of quality updates to the new Google Search Generative Experience that began to roll out a few weeks ago. The most noticeable update is that it is much faster, in fact, twice as fast, in responding with an AI-generated snapshot/answer.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said on Twitter, “we’ve made a number of quality updates, including a major improvement that reduces the time it takes to generate AI snapshots by half!”

Two weeks ago, we started opening up access to SGE. Since then, we’ve made a number of quality updates, including a major improvement that reduces the time it takes to generate AI snapshots by half! We hope everyone testing it out enjoys the speedier experience. If you haven’t…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 8, 2023

It is for sure much faster, it feels more than twice as fast. I only see the AI generation animated for a few seconds or so.

One of the biggest complaints and feedback was around speed. In fact, just a few days prior to this Google SGE improvement, The Verge wrote Google’s AI-powered search experience is way too slow.

Well, no longer, it is now just really fast. It is not as fast as a search result set being returned, but it is faster than other AI search engines. And yes, it will get faster.

The other “quality updates” that was included here are unknown, I did ask:

Can you share any of the other “quality updates” made here?

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 8, 2023

What other improvements did you notice outside of speed?

Here are some guesses from me:

Previously, I don’t think Google gave a recent answer, now it does:

I think this might be an example of a Google SGE quality update, before I don’t think it showed information from today for a query like this? pic.twitter.com/qKvGdvrAZ9

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 8, 2023

Also seems like Google updated this one:

Maybe this quality update improved this? Now I see… pic.twitter.com/SdQ6Z4JU1W

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 8, 2023

Glenn Gabe posted some before and after shots:

Another improvement IMO. A search for side effects from a drug yields no AI answer now, when it did then. Side effect searches are pretty dangerous for AI IMO… You can still see AI answers for some drugs + side effects, but for this one, the AI answer is gone. pic.twitter.com/BXjlV3ZubQ

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 9, 2023

And how about diversifcation? At least for me, a search for “AMP test” now yields more info about Google’s AMP test versus other AMP topics. The initial carousel links are more about Google’s AMP test vs pages about other topics. Aligns more w/the organic results for this ex: pic.twitter.com/mDPuKp9yCT

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 9, 2023

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Here is a video of how fast it is:

Yep, that’s pretty fast compared to how long it took previously. I barely had to wait… @dannysullivan do you know when this went live? Maybe I just didn’t realize how fast SGE was returning results for my latest searches. Or maybe this rolled out today?? pic.twitter.com/Xx313dtfZ4

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 8, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.