Well, we knew it was coming and here it is, Bard – Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Google is now having its trusted testers test out Bard and will soon roll it out more widely to users in Google Search and others products in the coming weeks, Google announced. It is not called Apprectice Bard but rather Bard.

I covered this when the news broke at Search Engine Land and as I pointed out, right now, Google does not have an answer for how to attribute or link to answers Bard generates – yet. But I do suspect Google will have some answer for it. I also mentioned that Google has been writing knowledge panels using AI and other methods since 2018 and said then it is not stealing. So it will be interesting to see what Google ends up doing here.

Bard is Google’s experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, where Google can answer questions that might not have one right answer. Google said they will roll this out more widely in the coming weeks but for now, only trusted testers (who is outsourced to a third-party company) will be able to play with it.

Google said, “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI features will begin rolling out on Google Search soon.”

Here is a screenshot they shared of how it might look in Google Search:

This is how it might look like in Google Search (without the attribution part…).

This is the Bard direct interface, not in search:

I am super excited to see how this evolves at Google, Bing and others.

It is not too far off from the leaks of the Bing ChatGPT interface.

Here is Sundar Pichai’s tweets:

2/ Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Today we’re opening Bard up to trusted external testers. pic.twitter.com/QPy5BcERd6

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023

4/ As people turn to Google for deeper insights and understanding, AI can help us get to the heart of what they’re looking for. We’re starting with AI-powered features in Search that distill complex info into easy-to-digest formats so you can see the big picture then explore more pic.twitter.com/BxSsoTZsrp

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023

5/ Developers can soon try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, our goal is to create a set of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023

Here is some of the SEO community reaction:

Yeah you would think that making statements like “some say this” and “others say that” would be substantiated with, IDK, a link to the source. Just an idea. https://t.co/P5xvGvAv1V

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023

Bard sounds like 🤮

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 6, 2023

Bard: What you get when you let AI name itself. https://t.co/todOZBbnCE

— Greg Finn (@gregfinn) February 6, 2023

Oh, bizarre. When the ChatGPT buzz began, I remarked that we’ll never get the Irish bards again with robots doing the thinking for us. How glib is Google naming this after humans who spent 7 years training to recite hundreds of poems + stories? And how weird for me to see it.

— Miriam Ellis (@Miriam_Ellis_) February 6, 2023

Attribution is a must – I hope this is not where Google is heading – this is not the way https://t.co/PRH2LSKjR7

— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) February 6, 2023

ESPECIALLY if the AI model charges for its services.

No, you can’t have my written work to use as you see fit for your paid service.

Or even to train your models. It’s my work? My written words?

The tech moves so fast this stuff takes time to catch up, but it’s important.

— Julie F Bacchini (@NeptuneMoon) February 6, 2023

It’s a little concerning to see that the screenshots Google shared do not show websites as sources used for the AI generated answer.

This is likely because the answer is generated from “the breath of the world’s knowledge.”

Drawing from the knowledge graph perhaps? pic.twitter.com/OVwuWScnDt

— Dr. Marie Haynes🐼 (@Marie_Haynes) February 6, 2023

Content creators that monetise via page views might be the biggest losers

— @[email protected] (@davidiwanow) February 6, 2023

Feel sorry for the dude who wrote the great in-depth article on what’s the easiest to learn, the guitar or the piano!

— Matthew Marley👨🏻‍💻 (@matthewmarley) February 6, 2023

Why would anyone want to publish blogs after that?
What’s the point of publishing original articles ?
Google will crawl my article, learn from it , serve the solution to its customers as its own. https://t.co/wSwTld3qRJ

— Fardun (@FardunRahman) February 6, 2023

In a world of AI search engine wars, the brand, unique perspective and insights & quality fact checking with references are becoming key to survive. Structured data & information have now become a commodity https://t.co/IpcRQFy56e

— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) February 6, 2023

Google Bard – a rival to ChatGPT

The end of SEO websites maybe. https://t.co/ZWowpV5DUg

— Liaqat Hussain 🇵🇰 (@Edwardian842) February 6, 2023

And from now on, whenever I hear “Google Bard,” I’ll think of the OG. #LegendOfVoxMachina #Criticalrole https://t.co/PuYfJaHaAE pic.twitter.com/SCr1YWsUZO

— Ian Lurie 🇺🇦 @[email protected] (@IanLurie) February 6, 2023

Going to be a busy few months… #GoogleBard https://t.co/aEKFLlmMeF

— Will O’Hara 👨🏽‍💻 (@willohara) February 6, 2023

I think Bard is just an iteration of Lambda and at last year’s Google product expert summit the product manager of Google brain did a presentation of lambda and it was awesome. It was like Google maps times 10

— Molly Youngblood (@mygeigermeister) February 6, 2023

Brain buzzing with all the search news and announcements this week! SEOs cannot sleep. What a time to be alive! The future is bright 🚀

— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 7, 2023

It’s too early to say, and your feedback can help to shape the next steps. What would you find useful and appropriate?

— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023

Make sure to send feedback. With bigger changes like this, it’ll probably take a few iterations before things settle down.

— johnmu is a ranking factor and so are you 🐀 (@JohnMu) February 7, 2023

Also, make sure to check out the roundup at Techmeme.

Forum discussion at Twitter, WebmasterWorld.

As you know, Yahoo is planning a come back to search with a new way of thinking about Yahoo Search. What that means, we don’t know yet, but we do know Yahoo is thinking hard about how they can compete. Greg Sterling ran a Twitter poll asking if Yahoo has a shot at it, and most say, nope – Yahoo Search is dead on arrival.

The poll on Twitter asked, “Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?” It received a nice number of responses, 631 responses. The results were not too optimistic.

• 43.7% said nope, dead on arrival
• 26.6% said depends on the UI/UX
• 29.6% said yes, now is the time

Here is that poll:

Yahoo is planning to “relaunch” search. Is there a chance to revive it?

— Greg Sterling 🇺🇦 (@gsterling) January 30, 2023

Personally, I think Yahoo has a good shot at it, better than most other companies. But time will tell and I am very much looking forward to seeing what Yahoo Search comes out with.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google has clarified in its search developer documents that JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa are all fully supported forms for structured data and Google Search. Google wrote, “all three supported formats are equally fine for Google, as long as they are valid and implemented properly per the feature’s documentation.”

The old paragraph in the documentation read:

Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise:

The new paragraph in the documentation now reads:

Google Search supports structured data in the following formats, unless documented otherwise. In general, we recommend using a format that’s easiest for you to implement and maintain (in most cases, that’s JSON-LD); all 3 formats are equally fine for Google, as long as the markup is valid and properly implemented per the feature’s documentation.

This was updated because Google’s Ryan Levering spotted the embedded tweet below, that shows there is confusion on which Google may or may not prefer. Ryan said, “We might need to tweak the wording for Google’s main structured data page.”

He said that Google “primarily recommend JSON-LD because sites screw up Microdata a lot more than they do JSON-LD because it’s embedded. We don’t have some secret plans to remove support for Microdata. Particularly for schema that is either very annotation/text heavy or very simple (so you don’t need to do meta tag gymnastics), Microdata can make more sense.”

Interesting that they are using ProfilePage markup for individual author pages. And wow, somehow it’s not in JSON-LD lol, but in microdata. ok ok 🤔 https://t.co/XKWZbzzMbL pic.twitter.com/Q0MQzG6W99

— 🐝 Olesia Korobka 💙💛🐝 (@Giridja) February 1, 2023

So Lizzi Sassman updated the docs to reflect this.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.