Google quietly extends the SGE experiment for at least few months: Report

We know that the Google Search Generative Experience has been in the beta testing stage ever since it launched a few months ago and people have a love-hate relationship with it right now because of the fact that it is not immensely better than what Google already provides with its featured snippets that are essentially a lit version of the SGE. However, we have also noticed that the SGE is currently an opt-in experiment which means that almost all the people who are not aware about it have not enabled it yet. This means that when the SGE fully rolls out to everyone then we will get the real feedback from variety of users.

Also, if you had noticed then there was a little hint at the top of SGE which said it ends Dec 2023. However, Google seems to have silently removed that little text at the top and it is no longer visible when you get answers from the SGE which does indicate that their experiment has been extended. When we first saw this deadline, we immediately thought that it is too early for such a massive experiment in Search and we were right.

PCMag reached out to Google regarding this and they confirmed that “the company plans to continue testing and exploring the applications for AI in search.” As we mentioned earlier, not everyone is liking SGE at the moment and one Reddit user commented that “It’s just an awful user experience that goes completely against Google’s stated premise of elevating expertise, authority, and trust,”. The basic idea of SGE is that it summarizes all the information that is present inside the content and provides it to you in simple, readable format.

Another report reveals that publishers are also worried about the rollout of SGE inside search they worry about the “technology’s potential to cut into their traffic since it summarizes content rather than sends users to the source. For example, The Atlantic‘s internal testing found that 75% of the time SGE generated a summary for a search inquiry that may have otherwise directed the user to its site.