SEO News You Can Use: Google Bard Adds More Features, Countries and Languages

SEO News You Can Use: New Updates to Chrome FLEDGE

Bard is getting another upgrade in its latest update on July 13, 2023. This update is a big one with several new productivity and accessibility features, languages and supported countries.

Let’s talk about Bard’s update in more detail below:

  • Language and new places: Initially only supporting English, Japanese and Korean language conversations, Bard expands to “majority of language coverage on the Internet.” This includes Hindi, German, Arabic, Traditional/Simplified Chinese and more. They’ve also expanded to all 27 European Union countries and Brazil.
  • Google Lens: You can now upload images to Bard to get more information about the image or generate captions for it. This feature only supports English languages at the moment.
  • Text-to-speech: Bard can also read text in 40 supported languages, such as Spanish and U.S. English.
  • Shareable chat links: Share your Bard conversations with others with just a link.
  • Pinned and recent conversations: You can now pin and rename conversations, saving them for later instead of resetting your chat history after leaving.
  • Customized responses: You’ll now have more control over Bard’s responses. You can make Bard’s response simpler, more professional or casual and longer or shorter.
  • More export code options: Streamline your programming tasks as Google adds the option of exporting Python code to Google. In the past, you could only export code to Google Colab.

With this update, we’re slowly seeing Google’s vision of Bard: a productivity and creativity assistant for people worldwide. 

For users of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, Google makes it clear that Bard isn’t going to compete with them. Instead, it builds upon its technological ecosystem to develop responsible AI practices that pave the way to more seamless, accessible workflows for everyone.

This is consistent with their previous statements on responsible AI and “human-centered technology.

Read Google Bard’s update log here.

More SEO News You Can Use

UK Economy Could Reap £400 Billion From AI – Google Report: Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t only a lucrative business opportunity. For the U.K., Google predicts that AI-powered innovation could generate £400 Billion in value. In their Google U.K. Economic Impact report, Google says that the U.K. could save 17 million workers’ hours per week, help 7 million people learn digital skills and create 457,000 jobs through an Android app economy. Google outlined vital ways it could help the U.K. realize this hundred-billion pound potential: (1) AI tools and tech investments, (2) Developing skills and talent to harness AI technology and (3) Engaging the AI ecosystem, including the government, academics and businesses. With this report, Google is carving out a space for itself in the future of an AI-driven economy, not only in the U.K. but around the world. For more of this story, read Google’s blog post here.

Google Wants Public Talk on AI Use: The search giant calls for a concerted effort to develop new standards and protocols to develop AI further. Google cited robots.txt as a successful example of a community-driven web standard. As AI raises concerns about data use and privacy, Google wants AI stakeholders to participate in “an open process… to balance AI progress with privacy, agency and control over data.”  While some welcomed this, many users pointed out that Google acted too late, citing an earlier change in its privacy policy to access public data to train its algorithms. As Google’s AI rivals grapple with copyright and privacy issues, consulting with stakeholders on accessing and using data seems like the better choice for the company. But will this come at the cost of its quality of service? If you want to have a say on AI’s future (at least within Google’s domain), sign up on their website. Read Google’s announcement for more information.

Gizmodo’s AI Article Finds Its Way on Top of Google Search: In a truly oopsie moment, Google’s algorithms mistakenly rank a highly-inaccurate Gizmodo Star Wars article in its “Top Stories” section. This is despite Google’s reminders to create content based on its E-E-A-T guidelines. Gizmodo’s deputy editor, James Whitbrook, called this AI piece “embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here.” The possibility of inaccurate AI-generated fluff is a scary proposition, both for Google and its users. While ranking on top of search results is good, risking that with flawed content has severe long-term reputational consequences. The Gizmodo team has already edited their article to fix these inaccuracies, but you can still access the original via the Internet Archive. As Google’s algorithms continue to evolve and with an upcoming AI content policy, publishers and content creators must practice due diligence and have a sense of responsibility over the content they share on the world wide web. Read Search Engine Land’s article for the whole story.

Google Says Don’t Disavow Links You Didn’t Buy: Consistent with their long-standing stance on link disavows, Google’s John Mueller advised that you shouldn’t use disavow unless you’ve been buying links for your website. This is a reply to a tweet that asked him: “Who’s a good source for dissecting spam links and how accurate is it to state Google understands and sees those sites that are of spam variety?” The bottom line is simply don’t use disavow unless you want to hurt your ranking. Dive deeper with this article from Search Engine Roundtable.

Google Advises Usage of Noindex for Syndicated Content: If you’re working with syndication partners, then you should tell them to use the noindex tag instead. Google Search Liaison reiterated this advice as research from NewzDash reveals that Yahoo’s syndicated content rank better in Google News than the original publishers. In a reply, Google said, “our recommendation is to require their partner to use noindex. That’s been our long-standing advice with Google News.” Google also reiterated that canonicalization tags no longer work because there will be differences between the original and syndicated content due to “substantially different templates, related articles, etc.” So, if you want to rank better than your syndication partners, Google advises that your agreement should require them to use noindex, not canonicalization tags. Learn more from Search Engine Journal’s post.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.

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