Nigeria, Oct. 28 -- New research from Ruhr University Bochum and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems shows that AI-powered search engines select information from very different parts of the Internet compared to traditional search results.

The pre-print study, titled "Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI," examined Google's standard search links alongside results from Google AI Overviews, Gemini-2.5-Flash, GPT-4o Web Search, and GPT-4o with Search Tool.

The analysts drew on user queries from multiple datasets, including political topics from AllSides and search data for popular products.

The researchers found that generative search systems often rely on less common sources. They report that 53 percent of websi...