Google introducing AI to search results

[AhFreshMeat]

Same search, new interface, if it even sticks and users use it instead of google. Thats not going to happen for quite some time. Keep publishing boys

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google Embarasses Itself & Creates Some Stock Volatility​

From Reuters:

LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.

For context, I grabbed the past 5 day chart:

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The article continues...

In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. The first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

This is from the same image I posted Monday, which you can see again here:

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But don't anyone worry, Google is on the case:

"This highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we're kicking off this week with our Trusted Tester program," a Google spokesperson said. "We'll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard's responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information."

In Google's sheer panic to get this out ASAP only because Bing came out swinging first (and there's You.com and Neeva.com already but they aren't big enough to "matter"), they even goofed up their promotional material.

I should feel bad for my schadenfreude but I don't in the slightest.

 

[Zoro]

Google Embarasses Itself & Creates Some Stock Volatility​

From Reuters:



For context, I grabbed the past 5 day chart:

​

The article continues...



This is from the same image I posted Monday, which you can see again here:

​

But don't anyone worry, Google is on the case:



In Google's sheer panic to get this out ASAP only because Bing came out swinging first (and there's You.com and Neeva.com already but they aren't big enough to "matter"), they even goofed up their promotional material.

I should feel bad for my schadenfreude but I don't in the slightest.

This make me think, when shit is rolled out on bing and google there will be loads of incorrect information. But who is going to check and care tbh? Social media is all about missinformation and people only beliving what they want so this is nothing more than that.

When I google I always look for 4-5 different angles and I bet people will still want to get most information from different sources.

 

[Boy]

This make me think, when shit is rolled out on bing and google there will be loads of incorrect information. But who is going to check and care tbh? Social media is all about missinformation and people only beliving what they want so this is nothing more than that.

Once people start burning their cakes, killing their pets, and getting each other pregnant because AI says gravity can act as birth control if the girl's on top, they'll become skeptics. So like, a few days after it hits the mainstream. Shit's gonna be lit.

 

[exarch]

Once people start burning their cakes, killing their pets, and getting each other pregnant because AI says gravity can act as birth control if the girl's on top, they'll become skeptics. So like, a few days after it hits the mainstream. Shit's gonna be lit.

yep, i was counting on the whole thing breaking down once it got mainstream, but they exceeded my expectations and managed to fuck it up way before that on the single example they used for their reveal

 

[socialpatterns]

In my opinion, there will always be negative press. There will be accidents on the way to a perfectly capable self driving car (and eventually more reliable than humans). There will be mistakes on this path of AI language models implemented into search. In the beginning, it will be fairly accurate on some searches, and inaccurate on others. As it evolves it will obviously get much better. They will figure out a way to improve the confidence in factual reliability of answers over time. So, any embarrassment, will just be a short term negative press. It is really funny though

While it obviously won't be an SEO killer, I feel like it will have a (much) greater impact on clicks (for certain terms) than featured snippets did. It seems like common sense to me that this will happen, but I respect and welcome any debate on this. It's so new, only time will tell.

 

[Google PE]

It is not yet clear how this will affect search and publishers.
One of the engineers said that the Google Bard is not as clever as ChatGPT.
I think it will look like this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not sure if you guys saw the griping out there. In fact, I think people are so demoralized and unsurprised that it just didn't get talked about like it should.

Google is rolling out Bard as a beta to journalists and some SEO's and whatever, and there's pretty much zero citations (unlike Bing). Meaning they're taking our content and spinning it and not giving out links for people to dive deeper. They said they do plan on showing citations whenever they use a long excerpt from an article, which I imagine would be less than 5% or even 3% of cases or even less lol.

Their justification has been "Well, this is original content so we don't need to provide citations." Which is a giant crock of shit and while the general public might not understand it and think this is real AI, the rest of us know they trained these models on content we provided and it's just rewriting it.

I saw one person coping saying "At least the chatbot urges people to visit the SERPs for more information, we'll get some traffic that way." But really that's just Google keeping people in Google's ecosystem, which exposes them to more ads.

Anyways, unless we cry about it publicly (We as in the people they're taking content from without providing anything in return this time), they're likely going to not provide citations.

An example I just came across:

 

[JOoa0ky]

My question is: Do the masses want AI creators or would they prefer Human creators?

 

[Ryuzaki]

My question is: Do the masses want AI creators or would they prefer Human creators?

They're going to want humans, I'd say with nearly 100% certainty. Which means walled garden social apps will improve in traffic, video featuring real people will grow even more, stuff like Substack with paid newsletters will grow, paywalls to big sites might increase...

And I think the obvious answer to the AI threat that Google faces in terms of SERP quality is going to be to crank the dial to maximum on YMYL and EEAT. Everything will be considered YMYL soon enough, if you think of YMYL as being the maximum level of EEAT. That's how you get real people and real content to surface.

And then the next target will be people with pen-names and AI avatars and all that, because people will learn to manipulate EEAT to create fake personas. It'll be expensive and time consuming, but people will do it, when it makes just as much sense to become the expert yourself. The end result of this will be the end of anonymity on the internet (for the most part) and possibly some universally adopted single-sign-on per person in the distant future.

 

[bernard]

Something to consider with what Ryu mentions above is the macrotrend of people wanting authenticity and they want it above quality even.

With Substack people understand that they're not getting a polished product, but they want the flaws, because it allows them to feel that there's a real person with less agenda behind it. When something is flawless, technically impressive, but void of soul, then people have become jaded enough to consider it fake, to have a hidden agenda ("they just want money").

Which is why I consider the "passionate noob" to be a great real life persona for your site. People like to read stuff from a passionate noob, because they feel that experts are gatekeepers, which is another macrotrend, the decline in belief in experts (considered elitist).

It's actually very easy to add this passionate noob persona, if you are willing to show your face or find someone willing to do it. It actually also allows you to write better reviews, because you don't have to rely so much on product specs etc.

 

[DarkCarnage]

Google is rolling out Bard as a beta to journalists and some SEO's and whatever, and there's pretty much zero citations (unlike Bing). Meaning they're taking our content and spinning it and not giving out links for people to dive deeper. They said they do plan on showing citations whenever they use a long excerpt from an article, which I imagine would be less than 5% or even 3% of cases or even less lol.

Will articles that need images for people to understand the content survive even if Bard is rolled out? I'm talking about highly visual niches like crafting, fashion, photography, art and design, and home decor. Words won't be enough for those kinds of queries right? Or will Bard start showing images as well?