It’s only been a month since Google debuted its AI-powered search engine at I/O — and even less time since an early preview went live for beta testers — but the company is already hard at work at improving its results. Just in time for the summer, Google’s Search Generative Experience (or SGE) is getting much better at delivering travel-based advice, whether you’re looking for a hotel in a foreign city or trying to find the best tourist attractions on your next vacation .
It’s no secret that SGE is far from perfect, especially when it comes to asking for recommended places to visit. We’ve found Reddit to be a far better guide for suggesting sites like hiking trails or other local spots — though that website certainly isn’t without its fair share of flaws. With today’s announcement, it sounds like Google is working to boost SGE’s ability to recommend places of interest, whether you’re exploring a new city or enjoying a stay-cation.
Google is specifically highlighting guidance for things like restaurant recommendations, hotels, and tourist attractions. The company is pulling from both web-based information and user reviews on Google, so asking SGE for information about an art museum could pull up its hours and recent reviews of its exhibits side by side.
There’s no shortage of websites that provide similar information — TripAdvisor, Yelp, and independent travel blogs all do the same thing — but being able to ask follow-up questions is an obvious benefit. It remains to be seen whether the company will scrape data from those sites in addition to its own user reviews, as plagiarism has proven to be a problem with SGE. But if it works well, Google’s AI-powered search tools could eventually evolve into a decent replacement for its now-defunct Trip summaries.
If you’re already testing SGE, these results should be available to you starting today. If you want to try out Google’s AI-powered search, you can sign up through the company’s Labs program.
