Google's Latest AI Tool Helps You Plan Your Next Vacation - How Does It Work?

Google's Latest AI Tool Helps You Plan Your Next Vacation - How Does It Work?

Google will introduce travel-related features such as trip planning, reviews, and destination photos in its new Artificial Intelligence search results. Search giant Google is beginning to introduce AI into its main search results, but it is opt-in at this time.

Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a module that sits on top of regular search results, providing AI-generated insights into search queries.

Search results can include everything from a brief text summary answering a question, to a complete recipe, to a day-by-day itinerary when asked about travel plans to a specific destination.

These AI-powered results also include links to websites, designed to help when a single website cannot provide all the information needed to properly answer a query.

Google's standalone AI chatbot Gemini can already provide a lot of travel-related information, including day-by-day itineraries, location descriptions, and even plotting key points around hotels on Google Maps.

If you participate in the SGE experiment as part of Google Search Labs, you can type in "I want to visit Toronto for 3 days in June, what's available?" and it will give you an overview of activities, places to eat, and an example itinerary.

This update will also include a list of hotel options in Toronto using Google's own Hotels and Flights services (with real-time booking data), as well as flights from home.

More than 200 million locations, including cities, landmarks, museums, and restaurants, are included in the data available to SGE in planning the perfect vacation.

Finding the perfect place to stay, good food, attractions and activities while on vacation can be a challenge, especially when you have to wade through dozens of potentially misleading websites.

Basically, Google does the search for you and uses an AI model to analyze the site's content and outline key points across multiple locations. It also provides links to the websites it used to create the summary so you can see for yourself.

If you type something like "plan a 3-day trip to Philadelphia for history" in the regular Google search box, SGE will pop up suggestions including attractions, restaurants, and necessary travel information.

It also provides sample itineraries that pull a variety of ideas from sites on the web, reviews, photos, and information from Google business profiles, including hours of operation.

Google states that by combining links in one place, along with contextual information from the AI, it "makes it easier to research destinations in more depth and compare different options."

At launch, it will only be available in English and in the U.S. to those with a personal Google account that is registered with the Search Lab and has SGE enabled.

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