Google Bard is Google’s cutting edge chatbot. It promises to change the search market forever and has the capability to simultaneously usher in a new era of productivity. We explore the implications of what this new technology means for the greater search market along with some of the unique ways that this exciting new technology can be used.

What is Google Bard?

Google Bard is an AI powered chatbot. It was announced shortly after OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the internet by storm. ChatGPT is widely acknowledged as the first AI Chatbot of its kind that provided a revolutionary leap in capabilities when compared to prior versions of chatbots.

Even though Google has been heavily investing in advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies for years, they were caught off-guard by the popularity of ChatGPT and quickly announced their competitor in February of 2023. After a rocky start, Google Bard is finding its footing.

Bard is a Large Language Model (LLM) that uses advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques to take in extremely large amounts of text information, consolidates it and allows people to interact with all of this data in the same way that you would ask a human a question. After Bard provides an answer, you can ask it follow-up questions and it will respond with meaningful answers.

The biggest differentiators of Google Bard compared to past chat bots are:

Ability to answer questions on a very broad range of topics.
Contextual awareness and the ability to answer questions based on prior answers.
Access to information available on the internet and ability to answer questions about current events.
Ability to answer technical questions and help with computer programming.

The best way to learn about Google Bard is to Join the Waitlist Today. — Join the waitlist and start using Google Bard for Free

How does Google’s Bard work?

Google Bard is backed by LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google fed LaMDA massive amounts of text data from books, text repositories and the internet. LaMDA takes this large amount of information into an AI model and begins to predict desired responses. Through countless iterations it eventually becomes better at answering questions that its asked.

When the LaMDA isn’t able to come up with the right answer on its own, humans intervene and help train the AI model until it gets better and better at providing helpful and safe responses.

When Will Google Bard be Available?

Google Bard is available today. Google launched a big update for it in May 2023 which improves upon a lot of its capabilities. Even more exciting is the removal of the waitlist to try the updated AI chatbot out.

It will soon be launching as an integrated service in many of the Google Workplace applications removing the need to search for a Google Docs or Google Sheets third party plugin.

How is Bard different from Google search?

Google Bard and Google Search are very different technologies. Google Search uses web crawlers to scour the internet’s websites, stores the text and images available, it then ranks the websites based on a large number of factors and provides links to websites with relevant information.

Bard takes in large amounts of information and then uses artificial intelligence to provide users with answers ot their questions. It is designed to provide users with relevant and useful information without people having to follow links to different websites. Bad can also answer follow-up questions and give custom results based on a users questions

Google Bard answering questions using a web interface for the chatbot. — Screenshot of the Google Bard Interface

Does Google Bard Cost Money?

The best part about Google Bard is that it is completely free to use. Once you join the waitlist and are approved you can begin using all of Google Bard’s features. ChatGPT has a premium tier for users that want to access their latest GPT-4 model, but as of writing Google Bard only has one version of their chatbot available. You will be able to use their latest technology free of charge.

Will Google Bard Replace Google Search?

It’s unlikely that Google Bard will fully replace Google Search. Google commands 92% of the global internet search market and has billions of dollars of reasons not to upset the status quo. It is rumored that Google will begin integrating the technology behind Google Bard into the Google Search experience.

Google has not announced any specific details of exactly how the search experience will change, but we won’t have to wait long to find out. Microsoft Bing, one of Google’s closes competitors with less than 2% of the global search market has already integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT into their search experience. A user can go to chat.bing.com and ask questions. Bing responds with natural language answers along with citations of where it found the data and links to webpages that may contain more detailed information. It is likely that Google will offer a similar experience.

One question we have to ask is how will Google monetize Google Bard. Google has had decades to figure out how to turn search results into a money printing machine. AI search bots are the biggest threat that Google has had to face since it became the most dominant search engine in the world. Every time someone receives an answer without having to use Google Search, they lose a little bit of money that they otherwise would have made on that search.

The biggest threat to Google isn’t that people will stop using Google.com to search the internet. The biggest threat is that people will receive answers to their questions without having to search the internet.

Is Google Bard Better than ChatGPT?

A lot of people have compared ChatGPT and Google Bard. Rather than picking one as the outright best, we see them as complimentary and different from each other.

Both ChatGPT and Google Bard are very good at answering general questions and can generate text content on command. However, Google Bard just recently gained the capability to write computer code where as ChatGPT has been able to do so for quite some time. On the other hand, Google Bard can answer questions about current events and has general knowledge by accessing the internet. ChatGPT has the capability to connect to the internet through ChatGPT Plugins but hasn’t released the feature to the public yet.

Conclusion

We generally lean towards using ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s paid tier in our day to day and augment it with Google Bard when we need to answer questions on current events. We use ChatGPT on a daily basis, and it helps with a lot of our system integration, programming and process automation work.

For most people, Google Bard will be a very useful tool that can answer questions with recent information for free. We highly encourage you to sign up for the service and give it a try. It’s the biggest competitor to ChatGPT, has a pleasant interface to interact with and will likely be integrated in with Google Search and Google Workplace in the near future.

Stay ahead of the curve and educate yourself on what this exciting new technology can do.