Glossary

Terms

AI search engine

A search tool that reads web pages, writes a short answer, and links to the sources it used.

Answer engine

A search product that returns one direct answer instead of a list of links.

AI Overview

A generated summary that some search engines show above their regular results.

Citation

A link or reference that points to the source behind a specific claim in an answer.

Grounding

Tying a model's answer to retrieved sources, so that its claims come from text the system actually found.

Hallucination

A confident statement from an AI system that is false or not supported by its sources.

Query fan-out

A method that splits one question into several related searches and combines the results into one answer.

Retrieval

The step where a system finds and selects the documents or passages it will use to answer.

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