GOOGLE

Google Announces Spam Update Part 2

Published

2 years ago

June 29, 2021

Google SearchLiaison announced on Twitter that the second part of Google’s spam update is under way. Similarly to the first spam update this update will conclude on the same day that is announced.

According to the announcement:

“The second part of our spam update has has begun today, and it will also conclude later today, unless we share otherwise.”

Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted that it is directly related to previous update and similar in nature.

“It’s all part of the same thing, just a second part.”

Yes. It’s all part of the same thing, just a second part.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 28, 2021

Spam Fighting and AI

Google SearchLiaison linked to their announcement from April 2021 (How we fought Search Spam on Google in 2020) where it was revealed that Google used AI to fight spam and has been doing so since 2020.

According to the announcement of the Spam AI:

“By combining our deep knowledge of spam with AI, last year we were able to build our very own spam-fighting AI that is incredibly effective at catching both known and new spam trends.

For example, we have reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content by more than 80% compared to a couple of years ago.”

Among the spam types addressed in that announcement is spam generated by hacked websites.

Google said it’s not a problem they can solve by themselves and appealed to publishers to take measures to keep their site software up to date to prevent hacking events from happening.

Google linked to their webmaster guidelines which lists the following types of spam that publishers should avoid.

Spam to Avoid Becoming Involved With

This is a partial list of the kind of spam that concerns Google:

Autogenerated content
Link schemes
Unoriginal content
Cloaking
Hidden text or links
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Abusing structured data

Link Schemes a Lucrative and Popular

Link schemes are a highly popular form of manipulating Google’s search results. There’s a huge business in developing ways to trick websites into linking to websites.

It’s debatable if Google’s AI can identify these kinds of link schemes, some of which were developed by so-called white hats…

Fake Alumni Trick

For example, I know that some link builders send outreach emails to universities and pretend to be alumni asking for a link to their latest venture.

Informational Site Trick

This is another “white hat” link building scheme designed to trick universities and non-profit sites by creating an informational site on a .org domain in order to represent it as being a non-commercial website providing information related to a topic of interest.

Once all the links are attained the link builder places a cross-domain rel canonical on the pages that collected links to tell Google to send all the link equity to the commercial site.

All the links that were given to the fake non-commercial site are now going to a commercial website.

Broken PDF Link Scheme

I know about this link scheme because a popular white hat link builder sent me an outreach email attempting to get me to link to their page.

The way it works is that first the link builders identify popular United States government or non-profit PDF files or web pages that have been moved to a different URL.

Next the link builder will create a fake non-commercial website on a dot org domain and represent it as the new home of whatever information was formerly hosted on the government or non-profit web page.

They then contact all the websites that are linking to the old URL (that is now a broken link) and ask them to update the link to the “new home” of those documents and information.

Once the sites are linking to the new URLs on their fake dot org site they then redirect all the links to the client site.

Niche Edit

Some link builders do something called a niche edit where they will add a link to an existing web page.

But niche edits earned a bad reputation in 2019 because some of the links were associated with hacked sites.

Several years ago in 2019 Buzzfeed reported on a link scheme involving “niche edit” links where Russian hackers were selling links from sites they had compromised.

It turned out that the web pages being edited to add a link were actually hacked sites that were being used to sell links from.

Content spammers are using AI tools to rewrite popular content.

There are many link and content schemes. It’s not surprising that Google would turn to sophisticated AI to try to get on top of it.

Why Two Google Spam Updates?

Google did not say why there are two spam updates and provided no more information other than to say that these two updates, released one week apart and lasting a single day, were related.

They didn’t indicate if the updates were AI related or involved a new technology.

Citations

Guidelines that provides information about kinds of spam Google finds objectionable
Google Webmaster Guidelines

Google article that revealed existence of spam fighting AI
How we fought Search spam on Google in 2020

Searchenginejournal.com

GOOGLE

Google’s Next-Gen AI Chatbot, Gemini, Faces Delays: What to Expect When It Finally Launches

Published

5 days ago

December 4, 2023

Max

In an unexpected turn of events, Google has chosen to postpone the much-anticipated debut of its revolutionary generative AI model, Gemini. Initially poised to make waves this week, the unveiling has now been rescheduled for early next year, specifically in January.

Gemini is set to redefine the landscape of conversational AI, representing Google’s most potent endeavor in this domain to date. Positioned as a multimodal AI chatbot, Gemini boasts the capability to process diverse data types. This includes a unique proficiency in comprehending and generating text, images, and various content formats, even going so far as to create an entire website based on a combination of sketches and written descriptions.

Originally, Google had planned an elaborate series of launch events spanning California, New York, and Washington. Regrettably, these events have been canceled due to concerns about Gemini’s responsiveness to non-English prompts. According to anonymous sources cited by The Information, Google’s Chief Executive, Sundar Pichai, personally decided to postpone the launch, acknowledging the importance of global support as a key feature of Gemini’s capabilities.

Gemini is expected to surpass the renowned ChatGPT, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and preliminary private tests have shown promising results. Fueled by significantly enhanced computing power, Gemini has outperformed GPT-4, particularly in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second), owing to its access to a multitude of high-end AI accelerators through the Google Cloud platform.

SemiAnalysis, a research firm affiliated with Substack Inc., expressed in an August blog post that Gemini appears poised to “blow OpenAI’s model out of the water.” The extensive compute power at Google’s disposal has evidently contributed to Gemini’s superior performance.

Google’s Vice President and Manager of Bard and Google Assistant, Sissie Hsiao, offered insights into Gemini’s capabilities, citing examples like generating novel images in response to specific requests, such as illustrating the steps to ice a three-layer cake.

While Google’s current generative AI offering, Bard, has showcased noteworthy accomplishments, it has struggled to achieve the same level of consumer awareness as ChatGPT. Gemini, with its unparalleled capabilities, is expected to be a game-changer, demonstrating impressive multimodal functionalities never seen before.

During the initial announcement at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, the company emphasized Gemini’s multimodal prowess and its developer-friendly nature. An application programming interface (API) is under development, allowing developers to seamlessly integrate Gemini into third-party applications.

As the world awaits the delayed unveiling of Gemini, the stakes are high, with Google aiming to revolutionize the AI landscape and solidify its position as a leader in generative artificial intelligence. The postponed launch only adds to the anticipation surrounding Gemini’s eventual debut in the coming year.

GOOGLE

Google Brings Bard Students Math and Coding Education in the Summer

Published

6 months ago

June 8, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

$Google Brings Bard Students Math and Coding Education in the Summer$

Google is stepping up its AI efforts this summer by sending Bard, its high-profile chatbot, to summer school. The aim? To boost the bot’s math and coding smarts. These developments are excellent news— when Bard first debuted, it was admittedly not a finished product. But Google is steadily plugging away at it, and have now implemented implicit code execution for logical prompts, and handy Google Sheets’ integration to take it to the next level.

Thanks to implicit code execution, Bard can respond to inquiries requiring calculation or computation with Python code snippets running in the background. What’s even more amazing is that coders can take this generated code and modify it for their projects. Though Google is still apprehensive about guaranteeing the accuracy of Bard’s answers, this feature is said to improve the accuracy of math and word problems by an impressive 30%.

In addition to this, Bard can now export directly to Sheets when asked about tables. So, you don’t need to worry about copying and pasting, which comes with the risk of losing formatting or data.

From the company’s I/O keynote address, it is clear that they are focused on making the most of what Bard can offer. As they continue to speak highly of the chatbot, we’re sure to expect more features and capabilities when the summer comes around.

GOOGLE

Google Bard vs. ChatGPT: which is the better AI chatbot?

Published

10 months ago

February 20, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Google Bard vs. ChatGPT: which is the better AI chatbot?

Google Bard and ChatGPT are two of the most prominent artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots available in 2023. But which is better? Both offer natural language responses to natural language inputs, using machine learning and millions of data points to craft useful, informative responses. Most of the time. These AI tools aren’t perfect yet, but they point to an exciting future of AI assistant search and learning tools that will make information all the more readily available.

As similar as these chatbots are, they also have some distinct differences. Here’s how ChatGPT and Google Bard measure up against one another.

Which is better, Google Bard or ChatGPT?

This is a tricky question to answer, as at the time of writing, you can only use Google Bard if you’re part of a select group of early beta testers. As for its competition, you can use ChatGPT right now, completely for free. You may have to contend with a waitlist, but if you want to skip that, there’s a paid-for Plus version offering those interested in a more complete tool the option of paying for the privilege.

Still, when Google Bard becomes more widely available, it should offer credible competition for ChatGPT. Both use natural language models — Google Bard uses Google’s internal LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), whereas ChatGPT uses an older GPT-3 language model. Google Bard bases its responses to questions on more recent data, with ChatGPT mainly trained on data that was available prior to 2021. This is similar to how Microsoft’s Bing Chat works.

We’ll have to reserve judgment on which is the more capable AI chatbot until we get time to play with Google Bard ourselves, but it looks set to be a close contest when it is more readily available.

Are Google Bard and ChatGPT available yet?

As mentioned, ChatGPT is available in free and paid-for tiers. You might have to sit in a queue for the free version for a while, but anyone can play around with its capabilities.

Google Bard is currently only available to limited beta testers and is not available to the wider public.

Banner of Google Bard intro from February 6.

What’s the difference between Google Bard and ChatGPT?

ChatGPT and Google Bard are very similar natural language AI chatbots, but they have some differences, and are designed to be used in slightly different ways — at least for now. ChatGPT has been used for answering direct questions with direct answers, mostly correctly, but it’s caused a lot of consternation among white collar workers, like writers, SEO advisors, and copy editors, since it has also demonstrated an impressive ability to write creatively — even if it has faced a few problems with accuracy and plagiarism.

Still, Microsoft has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine to give users the ability to ask direct questions of the search engine, rather than searching for terms of keywords to find the best results. It has also built it into its Teams communications tool, and it’s coming to the Edge browser in a limited form. The Opera browser has also pledged to integrate ChatGPT in the future.

ChatGPT	Google Bard
Accessible through ChatGPT site. Only text responses are returned via queries.	Integrated with Google Search. You only need to change a Google setting to get your regular search results when using Google Bard AI, and vice versa.
ChatGPT produces answers from its trained database from 2021 and before.	Google Apprentice Bard AI will be able to answer real-time questions.
Based on GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer).	Based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).
Service has a free and paid plan option (called ChatGPT Plus).	Service is free.
Has built-in plagiarism tool called GPT-2 Output Detector.	No built-in plagiarism detection tool.
Available now	Still in beta test phase

Google Bard was mainly designed around augmenting Google’s own search tool, however it is also destined to become an automated support tool for businesses without the funds to pay for human support teams. It will be offered to customers through a trained AI responder. It is likely to be integrated into the Chrome browser and its Chromium derivatives before long. Google is also expected to open up Google Bard to third-party developers in the future.

Under the hood, Google Bard uses Google’s LaMDA language model, while ChatGPT uses its own GPT3 model. ChatGPT is based on slightly older data, restricted in its current GPT3 model to data collected prior to 2022, while Google Bard is built on data provided on recent years too. However, that doesn’t necessarily make it more accurate, as Google Bard has faced problems with incorrect answers to questions, even in its initial unveiling.

ChatGPT also has a built-in plagiarism checker, while Google Bard does not, but Google Bard doesn’t have the creative applications of ChatGPT just yet.