Tag Archives: Google

Current Affairs, Politics, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Google is giving its dominant search engine an artificial intelligence makeover

Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., already has been testing its own conversational chatbot called Bard.

By Associated Press, May 1, 2023

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks Wednesday at the Google I/O keynote session in Mountain View, Calif..Josh Edelson / AFP – Getty Images

Now, Google is ready to test the AI waters with its search engine, which has been synonymous with finding things on the internet for the past 20 years and serves as the pillar of a digital advertising empire that generated more than $220 billion in revenue last year.

“We are at an exciting inflection point,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a packed developers’ conference in a speech peppered with one AI reference after another. “We are reimagining all our products, including search.”

Source: Google is giving its dominant search engine an artificial intelligence makeover

Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Memories & History, Music, Pleasures, Web & Technology

YouTube, the jewel of the internet | Financial Times

By Janan Ganesh, April 21 2023


YouTube can provide everything from renowned old TV series such as Cosmos and Civilisation to talks by philosophers, documentaries on the Meiji restoration and scouting reports on Barcelona’s Gavi © FT montage

The retirement speech of General Douglas MacArthur. A talk on three Caravaggio paintings by a National Gallery curator. Several hours of woodland noise to fall asleep to. All 13 episodes of Civilisation. Clips of how Gavi is coming on at Barcelona. An interview with Saul Bellow on Swiss Italian TV. A review of the De’Longhi Dedica coffee machine. A Tame Impala gig I missed in Hackney last summer. Gore Vidal drawling his way through Venice for 90 minutes. A guide to the five tones in spoken Thai.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Someone’s hour-long drive through my old neighbourhood in LA. A documentary about the Meiji Restoration in French. How to re-pressurise a boiler. The academic philosopher Anthony Quinton explaining Wittgenstein. Martha Nussbaum explaining Aristotle. An American expat eating bánh cuon in Hanoi. A British expat eating prawn pad kaprao in Bangkok. Versions of L’Orfeo from the Barcelona and Zurich opera houses. A discussion of how close China came to industrialising in the Song dynasty. Four parkour runners seemingly beating the Tube in a race from Moorgate to Farringdon stations. A 158-minute interview with Emmanuel Macron. How to use an Indesit washer-dryer. The above is a basket of goods from the great souk we call YouTube. I pay a tenner a month for these videos. I could put up with adverts and pay nothing.

Source: YouTube, the jewel of the internet | Financial Times

Current Affairs, Pleasures, Travel, Web & Technology

Google Search gets new travel features, including a ‘price guarantee’ tool for flights | TechCrunch

By Aisha Malik@aiishamalik1 / 7:20 AM PDT•April 3, 2023

From article…

Google announced today that it’s introducing three new Search features to make it easier for users to research hotels, book their next plane ticket and discover things to do while on vacation.

Most notably, the company is piloting a new “price guarantee” badge for flights. If you see a flight with the price guarantee badge, it means that Google believes that the price you see today won’t get any lower. If you book with Google, the company will watch the price, and if it drops, you will get the difference back. You can already see whether current prices are low, typical or high compared to historical averages, but this new badge goes beyond the current offerings.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…

Source: Google Search gets new travel features, including a ‘price guarantee’ tool for flights | TechCrunch

Current Affairs, Libraries, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Bing vs. Bard: We Compared Both Chatbots to See Which Is Better | Inverse

By Ian Carlos Campbell, March 27, 2023

NurPhoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Begun, the chatbot wars have. Microsoft was early out the gate with its updated version of Bing, appending chatbot functionality to its search engine and integrating both into the Edge browser, while Google trailed behind, only just recently making its Bard chatbot available to the public.

Both companies have big plans for generative AI (the catchall name for AI that produce images, text, and video), integrating features into productivity software like Word, Excel, Gmail, and Docs, and pitching their respective chatbots as search engine companions, if not someday replacements.

Now that Bing and Bard are available for anyone to try (waitlist notwithstanding in Bard’s case), Inverse put the chatbots in a head-to-head test to get a sense of their usefulness.

Source: Bing vs. Bard: We Compared Both Chatbots to See Which Is Better

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Is ChatGPT Closer to a Human Librarian Than It Is to Google?

A search engine researcher explains the promise and peril of letting ChatGPT and its cousins search the web for you.

By Chirag Shah, Published March 19, 2023

Illustration: Phonlamai Photo (Shutterstock)

The prominent model of information access and retrieval before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search engines are the primary way most people access information today, but entering a few keywords and getting a list of results ranked by some unknown function is not ideal.

A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access systems, which includes Microsoft’s Bing/ChatGPT, Google/Bard and Meta/LLaMA, is upending the traditional search engine mode of search input and output. These systems are able to take full sentences and even paragraphs as input and generate personalized natural language responses.

At first glance, this might seem like the best of both worlds: personable and custom answers combined with the breadth and depth of knowledge on the internet. But as a researcher who studies the search and recommendation systems, I believe the picture is mixed at best.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-openai-like-a-librarian-search-google-1850238908

Current Affairs, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Similarities between Survivor and chess | Bard | Google

Editor’s Note: I asked Bard to summarize the similarities between the tv show Survivor and chess. Here’s the response…

There are several similarities between the TV show Survivor and chess. Both games are strategic and require players to think ahead and plan their moves. Both games also involve a degree of luck, as players must sometimes make decisions based on incomplete information. Finally, both games can be very competitive, as players strive to outwit and outplay their opponents.

Here are some specific similarities between Survivor and chess:

  • Both games are strategic. In Survivor, players must make decisions about how to allocate their resources, who to align with, and when to make big moves. In chess, players must develop a plan of attack and defend their pieces from their opponent’s attack.
  • Both games require players to think ahead and plan their moves. In Survivor, players must think about how their decisions will affect the game in the future. In chess, players must think about how their moves will affect the game in the next few moves.
  • Both games involve a degree of luck. In Survivor, players must sometimes make decisions based on incomplete information. For example, players may not know who has an idol or who is planning to vote for them. In chess, players may not know what their opponent’s next move will be.
  • Both games can be very competitive. In Survivor, players strive to outwit and outplay their opponents. In chess, players strive to checkmate their opponent’s king.

Despite these similarities, there are also some important differences between Survivor and chess. For example, Survivor is a game of social dynamics, while chess is a game of strategy and tactics. Additionally, Survivor is a game of endurance, while chess is a game of mental focus.

Source: https://bard.google.com/