Google’s AI-powered search is coming to a lot more countries
Google is bringing its Search Generative Experience (SGE) to more than 120 new countries, including Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, according to a blog post from Google’s Hema Budaraju. SGE will also support four new languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Indonesian, which add to its current support for English, Hindi, and Japanese.
The expansion means that a lot more people can choose to mess around with SGE. You’ll still need to jump through some hoops to try it: you have to opt in via Google’s Search Labs program, and once you have, you can only use SGE on Chrome on desktop or the Google app on Android and iOS. (In the newly added countries, SGE is accessible on Chrome on desktop beginning Wednesday and will be available in the Google app “over the coming week,” according to Budaraju’s blog.)
In an interview, Budaraju declined to share if or when SGE might be available in more browsers. However, she did say that “in the future, we probably will have to come back to you.”
Interestingly, on my Search Labs page, there are notes that say that SGE and SGE while browsing experiments end in December 2023. I asked Google about it. “Our goal with this phase of SGE is to get feedback and iterate on the experience alongside our users,” Google spokesperson Craig Ewer said in a statement to The Verge. “We don’t have anything further to share on future plans.”
That doesn’t exactly clear things up. But given this major expansion and CEO Sundar Pichai’s previous statement that SGE will eventually be “just how search works,” I doubt that SGE is going away anytime soon.
Google is also adding a handful of new features to SGE.
SGE results, when they’re good, answer your queries without requiring you to click out to other sources, which is a pretty fundamental shift to search. While Budaraju didn’t have any specific metrics to share about whether SGE results have changed click-through rates from search results to other sources, Google has already updated SGE to improve how it surfaces and contextualizes links.
