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Is Is Search, or Is It AI? Does It Matter?
(original post on Searchblog)
Last week, while working on a post about what the ads might look like inside chat-based search, I got a surprising note from the communications team at Google. I had emailed them asking for comment on ads inside Bard, which Google had announced earlier in the month. To be honest, I was expecting the polite “no comment” I ultimately did receive, but I also got this clarification:
[We] wouldn’t have anything additional to share from the Search POV, as Bard is a standalone AI interface and doesn’t sit within Search.
There’s a lot to unpack in that statement, even if you’ve haven’t spent a career decoding big tech company communications. I mean, I read Google’s blog post about Bard, watched their event where Bard was rolled out, and even read transcripts of their earnings report . I’m not a newbie when it comes to all this, and now here was Google telling me I got it all wrong. I responded with another question:
OK thanks. But…I’m confused. I thought Bard was Google’s answer to Bing Chat? It’s not a search product? What is it?
OK, calling Bard Google’s “answer to Bing Chat” might have been a bit cheeky, but let’s be honest, that’s exactly what it was — Google rushed out a blog post about Bard one day before Microsoft’s announcement of BingChat…
