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Google Search Generative Experience – It’s All New AI Search Engine

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12 months ago

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Google Search Generative Ai Experience Robot

Google announced a preview, a labs experiment, of its all-new search engine, it is calling Google Search Generative Experience. This is where Google brings in generative AI into the search interface and makes a search interface designed more for a youthful audience.

I covered this in super detail on Search Engine Land so here I will give a briefer overview of the changes, after having a night to sleep on it, and consuming feedback from the search marketing community.

In short, I was pleasantly surprised by the interface, as I expected the UI to be less generous to content creators, publishers, site owners, and SEOs. But I believe this interface does make efforts to generate clicks from the new search results interface to websites.

Here is a quick first impressions video I recorded for this blog post:

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Quick Jump Links To Sections:

How It Looks & Feels

Here is a screenshot from Google that I mocked up to explain the all-new search interface from Google – you can click on the image to enlarge:

click for full size

Google will generate an answer for some, not all questions, and show this animation of Google working up an answer. Google will show some of the more trusted and high-quality web sites as clickable links, with an image, title and URL, right in the answer box. These sites make up part of the answer and are sites Google has a high degree of trust, enough to show them in this answer box.

You can use the toggle expander button to dive deeper into the answers and/or ask follow-up questions below. Or scroll past it to see the more traditional search result listings.

Here is a GIF of it in action – do notice the products from the Shopping Graph (click to enlarge):

Google Search Generative Experience 640

I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised with how Google is showing links to publishers. I don’t think most were thinking Google would be highlighting these publishers and content creators as much as they are here, after seeing the laughable way Google Bard handled citations, or lack thereof.

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One note, Google said the colors of the answer box or container plays a role. The color can dynamically change based on the searcher’s specific journey types and the query intent itself, Google told me.

How It Works

Yea, this uses a bunch of AI, LLMs, and machine learning, including many exciting search algorithms to function. This new experience is powered by a variety of large language models, including an advanced version of MUM and PaLM2. This model is different from what Bard uses, it was trained to carry out tasks specific to search, including ways to identify high-quality sites that corroborate the information presented in the output, Google told us.

Yes, it uses Google Search’s core ranking systems for this purpose. Google said this helps them “significantly mitigate: some of the known limitations of LLMs, like hallucination or inaccuracies.

On top of that, Google also deploys its Search Quality Raters to evaluate these results and takes that feedback to improve the models going forward. Google also conducts adversarial testing of these systems to identify areas where the systems aren’t performing as intended, the company told me.

YMYL comes into play to, and if Google does show a response here, Google will add a disclaimer to YMYL categories of responses. Google told us “on health-related queries where we do show a response, the disclaimer emphasizes that people should not rely on the information for medical advice, and they should work with medical professionals for individualized care.”

And Google might not give generative answers when there is a lack of quality or reliable information, such as with “data voids” or “information gaps.” And Google won’t respond to explicit or dangerous topics.

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Google applies the same policies it uses for featured snippets and autocomplete, as well as its other Search content policies.

Google rather not respond in a fluid tone because searchers are more likely to trust fluidity, Google told us. “We have found that giving the models leeway to create fluid, human-sounding responses results in a higher likelihood of inaccuracies (see limitations below) in the output. At the same time, when responses are fluid and conversational in nature, we have found that human evaluators are more likely to trust the responses and less likely to catch errors,” Google told us.

On Google Search Console and tracking clicks from the new search experience. Liz Reid from Google told me it is just a labs experiment now and Search Console integration is not planned right now. John Mueller of Google kind of said the same thing on Twitter:

Although I do doubt Google will add such a feature because they refused to do so with featured snippets.

But it will have a normal search referral:

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Search Ads

Finally, Google will show Google Ads in this new experience, just like it does in the normal Google Search. It will label those ads as “sponsored” with the black sponsored label. Your ads that you run in Google Search will potentially show here too. Right now there is no way to differentiate and say, do not show my ads in the new experience or not. But this is a super early beta, and Bing Chat does the same thing.

“We’ll test and evolve the ads experience as we learn more,” Google told us.

Here is what it looks like:

click for full size

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, confirmed this with this tweet:

How To Sign Up

Google has opened its waitlist for the Search Generative Experience in Search Labs at labs.google.com/search. You can sign up to join the waitlist today. Click on the Labs icon in the Google app or Chrome desktop to express your interest, Google said.

Google won’t start inviting people to try it for a couple of weeks and those invites will go out in waves.

It will be available first on Chrome desktop and the Google App (Android and iOS) in the U.S. and English-only.

I believe some of the early reaction, without reading the details, were pretty negative but overall, I think when people see the layouts and links, they are surprised in a good way. I think, SEOs and content creators were expecting a lot worse. And honestly, I personally don’t think this is bad at all.

But here are some early reactions:

Here is a quick poll that should update later today with results, so feel free to take it:

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.



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SEARCHENGINES

Daily Search Forum Recap: April 25, 2024

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6 hours ago

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April 25, 2024

By

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.


The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out and the SEO chatter is super heated despite the tools calming. Google Ads API version 16.1 is now out. Google’s John Mueller says splitting and merging sites takes longer than normal site moves for Google to process. Google updated its favicon documentation. And a scathing report on how Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan killed Google Search.


Search Engine Roundtable Stories:


  • Google March Core Update Stilling Rolling Out & Heated SEO Chatter Continue


    Over the past few days, while I was offline, the SEO chatter around the Google search ranking volatility continued to be super heated. The Google tracking tools seemed to calm down a bit, but the chatter is still very heated. This is all while the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 51 days later.


  • Report: How Prabhakar Raghavan Killed Google Search


    Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s former head of ads – led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.


  • Google Favicon Documentation Adds Rel Attribute Value Definitions


    Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.




  • Google Ads API Version 16.1 Now Available


    Google released version 16.1 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes query assets for Demand Gen, more location service details, more support warnings, Target ROAS bid simulation and more.




  • Google: Splitting & Merging Sites Takes Longer Than Normal Site Migrations


    Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a site into two or more sites while merging content on those sites. John Mueller from Google said it takes Google longer to process site splits and merges than normal site migrations.




  • Google Chefs In Dublin


    Here is a photo I found on Instagram of a bunch of chefs at the Google office in Dublin. I am not sure if this was for some event or if Googlers were doing some sort of cooking class but it was a photo that caught my eye.

Other Great Search Threads:

Search Engine Land Stories:

Other Great Search Stories:

Analytics

Industry & Business

Links & Content Marketing

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Local & Maps

Mobile & Voice

SEO

PPC

Search Features

Other Search

Feedback:


Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, on Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and you can follow us on Facebook and on Google News and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.

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SEARCHENGINES

Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO

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1 day ago

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April 24, 2024

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Google Tracks

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.

Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:

We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.

Forum discussion at X.

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Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.



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SEARCHENGINES

Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages

Published

2 days ago

on

April 23, 2024

By

Google Robot Blindfolds

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.

In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”

John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”

Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:

It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).

Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.

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Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.

Here are those new posts in context:

And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:

And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

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