Google says its Bard chatbot isn’t a search engine — so what is it?
Bard looks like a search engine, though Google says it isn’t one. | Image: Google
“Bard is a complement to search.” That’s how Google describes the relationship between Bard, the new chatbot entering into beta testing today, and its monolithic search engine. The way the company sees it, Bard is less a tool for finding information and more a way to automatically generate ideas and emails. And poems. And poem-emails. You want answers to search queries? That’s what Google search is for. There’s even a “Google It” button at the bottom of most Bard responses.
But the thing about Bard — and really the thing about every chatbot including ChatGPT and the new Bing — is that Google doesn’t actually get to choose how you use it. People have spent the last few months using ChatGPT to replace a search engine… and wondering what…
