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Google Indexing Bard Conversations In Search Results (www.searchenginejournal.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Google is coming under scrutiny after people discovered transcripts of conversations with its AI chatbot are being indexed in search results.

You can replicate what others are seeing by typing ‘site:bard.google.com/share‘ into the Google Search bar.

I tried this out for myself, and as one example found a writer brainstorming story ideas and using her full name. It seems that when you hit "export/share" on Bard, while you might think only people with access to the link that's created can view the conversation, in fact Google makes the conversation public and searchable. This is far more problematic than the vague privacy threat of your prompts being used to train the models and later being spit back to some random person in a reply. This lets you read full conversations. AI in general has a privacy problem, but this is a good reason not to use Bard in particular (if it sucking wasn't enough reason for you)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That was my experience a few years ago. I would find myself first searching in DDG then using the g! or SP! search bangs to use Google or startpage. However, I have not needed that in at least a year or two. DDG now pretty much meets all my search needs.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What DDG doesn't seem to do well is search a term which includes an exact match phrase. What I mean is this.

If I search in DDG for 'eyepatchcheetah "That was my experience a few years ago."' it will give me a bunch of unrelated results with all of those words but not necessarily in that order, but if I put that into Google, this thread would be more likely to be at the top. This is a way I search for things quite often, so it's kind of annoying to have to go back to Google to do those sorts of searches.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same. It completely ignores exact phrase match so you can't drill down with the most important aspects of a query. Ecosia was the same way IIRC, so it might be related to people using Bing data as a 3rd party perhaps

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's such a stupid thing to not work. If you're looking for a specific webpage or even an error code or something it's just impossible now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The fact that you can use bangs in DDG is so powerful that I don't understand why not more people use it as their main search engine. The few times when it's not good enough just add the !g after your search (it doesn't even need to be before) and get redirected to Google.