Game Changer or Game Over for Your Website: Road testing Google's New AI Bard
Once upon a time, two schoolboys found more intrigue in dismantling their storytelling robot, The Bard, than listening to its tales.
In 'Someday,' a 1956 short story by famed science fiction author Isaac Asimov, The Bard is an older model storytelling robot, seemingly obsolete, often neglected but filled with tales to tell.
67 years later, Google's Bard, a conversational AI is here in real life to help you with everything from planning a children's birthday party to simplifying complex topics.
It works by 'reading' trillions of words sourced from a bank of information, content and data to then respond back to your question or request.
Underpinning Bard is Google's breakthrough AI invention, LaMDA, known as the 'Language Model for Dialog Applications'. (Not to be confused with the Lambada, the Brazilian dance craze from the 90s).
LaMDA was created to have conversations with humans and is " pre-trained on a dataset of 1.56T words from public dialog and other public web documents" according to a Google research paper on, LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. (Thoppilan et al., 2022).
Launched in 2017, LaMDA operates by discerning the intricate patterns that constitute human language and was tested by and against a team of humans.
Why Is Google Bard So Important
As the most substantial development from the tech giant since the release of Google Adwords, Google's Bard will redefine how people find information, where they get their answers from and importantly, who is having the conversation with that person.
It's estimated 99,000 searches per second are made on Google (yes, we asked Google Bard this question and it pulled that answer and cited the article source as a Techjury blog).
News and media publishers, who rely on their online presence and website traffic for ad revenue, are already bracing themselves for the potential seismic shifts Bard will bring about.
With Google highlighting Bard and generative AI as a future feature integrated into its search engine, the potential implications are too significant to ignore.
While it presents an exciting frontier, it also signals a shift in how your website or content could be accessed by someone interested in finding something out about your business.
We don't know if we are standing on the precipice of increased visibility or a potential vanishing of websites, articles, and blog posts.
With Bard joining OpenAI's ChatGPT, the playing field will be completely transformed (again), making it crucial for businesses to understand the aftershocks of this ground-breaking AI.
Roadtesting Bard: Three Real-Life Examples
To really get to grips with what Bard could mean for the future of our websites, we decided to put it through its paces by asking three common and popular questions from consumer searches on: e-waste recycling, battery disposal and buying eco-friendly gifts.
We then compared the Bard responses with the Google Search results.
The questions for our road test are sourced from an industry-standard SEO platform that monitors real-time volumes of searches and ranks positions for website keywords across major search engines worldwide.
We picked 3 often-asked questions on search in Australia across the last 12 months, serving as the perfect litmus test for Bard's capabilities.
We asked it:
- Where do I find eco friendly gifts?
- How to recycle e waste?
- How do I safely dispose of old batteries?
The responses we received, as we'll reveal in our next newsletter, offer a fascinating insight into the potential of this new AI-driven search tool and the future of the web.....
This blog post was written by a human 👋 with assistance in research from
🤖 ChatGPT4 and Google Bard, identified below.
Sources:
✍️ Asimov, Isaac. "Someday." from The Complete Robot, Harper Collins UK 2018 paperback edition, story first published in Infinity Science Fiction, 1956 by Royal Publications Inc.
✍️ Screenshot of Cathy Edwards, VP Of Engineering At Google shown at Google I/O 2023 YouTube Video https://youtu.be/QpBTM0GO6xI accessed 20/5/23
✍️ LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. Thoppilan, R., De Freitas, D., Hall, J., Shazeer, N., Kulshreshtha, A., Cheng, H., ... & Le, Q. (2022).
arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08239. @ Cornell University
Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239
🤖 The Stupendous World of Google Search Statistics - Techjury article by Christo Petrov. Link at https://techjury.net/blog/google-search-statistics/.
💃🕺 The Lambada, 1990s Brazilian dance craze. Link at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyLdoQGBchQ
