Google's search engine's latest AI injection will answer voiced questions about video and photos

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Google is pumping more artificial intelligence into its search engine

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is injecting its search engine with more artificial intelligence that will enable people to voice questions about images and occasionally organize an entire page of results, despite the technology's past misadventures with misleading information.

The latest changes announced Thursday herald the next step in an AI-driven makeover that Google launched in mid-May when it began responding to some queries with summaries written by the technology at the top of its influential results page. Those summaries, dubbed “AI Overviews,” raised fears among publishers that fewer people would click on search links to their websites and undercut the traffic needed to sell digital ads that help finance their operations.

Google is addressing some of those ongoing worries by inserting even more links to other websites within the AI Overviews, which already have been reducing the visits to general news publishers such as The New York Times and technology review specialists such as TomsGuide.com, according to an analysis released last month by search traffic specialist BrightEdge.

The same study found the citations within AI Overviews are driving more traffic to highly specialized sites such as Bloomberg.com and the National Institute of Health.

Google's decision to pump even more AI into the search engine that remains the crown jewel of its $2 trillion empire leaves little doubt that the Mountain View, California, company is tethering its future to a technology propelling the biggest industry shift since Apple unveiled the first iPhone 17 years ago.

The next phase of Google's AI evolution builds upon its 7-year-old Lens feature that processes