SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 queries about objects in a picture. The Lens option is now generates more than 20 billion queries per month, and is particularly popular among users from 18 to 24 years old. That's a younger demographic that Google is trying to cultivate as it faces competition from AI alternatives powered by ChatGPT and Perplexity that are positioning themselves as answer engines.
Now, people will be able to use Lens to ask a question in English about something they are viewing through a camera lens — as if they were talking about it with a friend — and get search results. Users signed up for tests of the new voice-activated search features in Google Labs will also be able to take video of moving objects, such as fish swimming around aquarium, while posing a conversational question and be presented an answer through an AI Overview.
“The whole goal is can we make search simpler to use for people, more effortless to use and make it more available so people can search any way, anywhere they are,” said Rajan Patel, Google's vice president of search engineering and a co-founder of the Lens feature.
Although advances in AI offer the potential of making search more convenient, the technology also sometimes spits out bad information — a risk that threatens to damage the credibility of Google's search engine if the inaccuracies become too frequent. Google has already had some embarrassing episodes with its AI Overviews, including advising people to put glue on pizza and to eat rocks. The company blamed those missteps on data voids and online troublemakers deliberately trying to steer its AI technology in a wrong direction.
Google is now so confident that it has fixed some of its AI's blind spots that it will rely on the technology to decide what types of information to feature on the results page. Despite its previous bad culinary advice about pizza and rocks, AI will initially be used for the presentation of the results for queries in English about recipes and meal ideas entered on mobile devices. The AI-organized results are supposed to be broken down into different groups of clusters consisting of photos, videos and articles about the subject.
FILE - A sign is shown on a Google building at their campus in Mountain View, Calif., on Sept. 24, 2019. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
FILE - Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
BEIRUT (AP) — The Israeli military on Thursday warned people to evacuate a city and other communities in southern Lebanon that are north of a U.N.-declared buffer zone, signaling that it may widen a ground operation launched earlier this week against the Hezbollah militant group.
Israel has told people to leave Nabatieh, a provincial capital, and other communities north of the Litani River, which formed the northern edge of the border zone established by the U.N. Security Council after the two sides fought a war in 2006. Each side accuses the other of violating the resolution.
At least eight Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where Israel announced the start of what it says is a limited ground incursion earlier this week. The region was meanwhile bracing for Israeli retaliation following an Iranian ballistic missile attack.
The World Health Organization reported that 28 health workers were killed in the past day in Lebanon. The announcement of the deaths comes after three dozen health facilities were closed in the south and five hospitals were either partly or fully evacuated in Beirut.
Israeli strikes that hit health facilities and workers violate international law and treaties, Lebanese Health Ministry Firas Abiad said.
“This is a war crime, there is no doubt about that,” Abiad said. “International laws are clear in protecting these people — I mean, paramedics. Who gave Israel the right to be the judge and the executioner at the same time?”
The Lebanese Red Cross said an Israeli strike wounded four of its paramedics and killed a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south. It said the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted Thursday despite coordinating its movements with U.N. peacekeepers. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Another Lebanese soldier was killed by Israeli fire at an army post in the southern town of Bint Jbeil, according to the Lebanese military, which said it returned fire. A Lebanese security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity according to regulations, said the army post was hit by artillery fire.
An Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Beirut late Wednesday killed nine people, including seven Hezbollah-affiliated civilian first responders. Israel has been pounding areas of the country where the militant group has a strong presence since late September, but has rarely struck in the heart of the capital.
There was no warning before the strike late Wednesday, which hit an apartment not far from the United Nations headquarters, the prime minister’s office and parliament.
Residents reported a sulfur-like smell following the strike in Beirut, and Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency — without providing evidence — accused Israel of using phosphorous bombs, which would be a violation of international law. Human rights groups have in the past accused Israel of using white phosphorus incendiary shells on towns and villages in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hezbollah has an armed wing with tens of thousands of fighters, but it also has a political movement and a network of charities staffed by civilians.
The Israeli military said Thursday that it had struck around 200 Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including weapons storage facilities and observation posts. It said the strikes killed at least 15 Hezbollah fighters.
Hezbollah said its fighters detonated a roadside bomb when Israeli forces entered the Lebanese border village of Maroun el-Ras, killing and wounding soldiers. It was not possible to independently confirm the claims made by either side.
So far, ground clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have been confined to a narrow strip along the border.
But hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, as Israel has warned people to evacuate from dozens of villages and towns in the south, telling them to relocate to areas that are around 60 kilometers (36 miles) from the border and considerably farther north than the Litani River.
Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the militants were to withdraw north of the Litani, and Lebanon's armed forces were to patrol the border region along with U.N. peacekeepers.
Neither Lebanon's army nor the peacekeepers were capable of imposing any agreement on Hezbollah by force, and Israel says it defied the resolution and built extensive military infrastructure in towns and villages near the border. Lebanon has accused Israel of violating other parts of the resolution.
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah after nearly a year of rocket attacks that began Oct. 8 and displaced some 60,000 Israelis from communities in the north. Israel has carried out retaliatory strikes over the past year that have displaced tens of thousands on the Lebanese side.
In recent weeks, Israelis strikes in Lebanon have killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his top commanders. Hundreds more airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon since mid-September have killed at least 1,276 people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
The vast majority of recent strikes have been in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence, including the southern suburbs of Beirut known as the Dahiyeh. But Israel has also carried out strikes in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and a strike in central Beirut earlier this week killed three members of a leftist Palestinian militant group.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they launched two drones at Tel Aviv overnight. The military said it identified two drones off the coast of the bustling metropolitan area, shooting one of them down while the other fell in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which also includes armed groups in Syria and Iraq. They have launched attacks on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians, drawing retaliation in a cycle that has repeatedly threatened to set off a wider war.
The region once again appears on the brink of such a conflict after Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday, which it said was a response to the killing of Nasrallah, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who was with him, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who was killed in an explosion in Tehran in July that was widely blamed on Israel.
Both Israel and the United States have said there will be severe consequences for the missile attack, which lightly wounded two people and killed a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. The United States has rushed military assets to the region in support of Israel.
President Joe Biden said he did not expect Israel to retaliate against Iran on Thursday and rejected the suggestion that the U.S. would grant permission for such an attack.
“First of all, we don’t ‘allow’ Israel, we advise Israel," Biden said. "And nothing’s going to happen today.”
The escalating violence in Lebanon has opened a second front in the war between Israel and Iran-backed militants that began nearly a year ago with Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago. It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders.
There was no immediate comment from Hamas. Mushtaha was a close associate of Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 attack. Sinwar is believed to be alive and in hiding in Gaza.
This story has been corrected to show that the four Red Cross paramedics were wounded in an Israeli strike, not killed.
Jeffery reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press staff writers Abby Sewell and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut and Zeina Karam in London contributed to this report.
Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)
Volunteers of the Russian Cultural Center entertain displaced children at a school in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, after fleeing the Israeli airstrikes in the south. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Volunteers of the Russian Cultural Center entertain displaced children at a school in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, after fleeing the Israeli airstrikes in the south. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Zahraa on a wheel chair looks on as volunteers of the Russian Cultural Center entertain displaced children at a school in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, after fleeing the Israeli airstrikes in the south. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Fadi Tawil)
A wrecked car parked next to the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
A man documents the damaged buildings at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
A woman reacts in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Hezbollah paramedic stuff left on the debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Hezbollah paramedics walk between debris after an airstrike hit an apartment in a multistory building, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Lebanese women stand in front an apartment in a multistory building hit by Israeli airstrike, in central Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
