Bluebell DigiNews Winter Edition
ChatGPT Takes Over the World
Could this have been the week that everything changed for the search industry? Two announcements have shaken up the tech world, as the two biggest search rivals Microsoft and Google have both tried to position themselves as a leader in using artificial intelligence or AI in their search engines.
You probably first heard about ChatGPT late last year as its parent company OpenAI released a new version to the public, which swiftly caused a sensation as people experimented with its powerful capabilities. From writing decent quality blog posts to spitting out computer code or student essays, the AI engine seemed to suddenly offer a world of time-saving possibilities.
However, when you use ChatGPT to produce some content on a subject you are familiar with, you will soon see some of the drawbacks of the technology. It is able to write convincing copy, because it has been trained a massive range of documents and content scanned from the Internet in a snapshot exercise (it isn’t current as this dataset was taken around 2 years ago). As it is just a huge database of this content, the articles it can write often seem quite bland and generic, as they are a kind of patchwork average of a number of sources that it has pulled its “knowledge” from.
In fact it is important to understand that the AI doesn’t have knowledge in any sense similar to a human. It doesn’t know anything and doesn’t really understand what it is producing and can’t determine in any concrete way whether information is factual or false. This means you can easily get it to display misleading info or just stuff that is completely made up and bears no relation to any objective truth.
With these limitations in mind, when you generate some text, you can quickly identify areas that need to be edited, either because they don’t have great style, are not very interesting or are just plain wrong. ChatGPT is still very much in experimental mode and AI like this has a long way to go before it can even began to challenge human writers.
As a tool, it is definitely powerful and it is useful if you are lacking ideas on a topic or want to set up a skeleton structure for a piece of work, which you then edit down and provide more meat on the bones through your own knowledge and experience. It could also automate very low value writing tasks or other areas such as writing basic code. However, ChatGPT or other AI assistants can’t be left out in the wild to do these things - human intervention and supervision is going to be necessary at this point in their evolution. No doubt every time you use these tools, you are helping to train them further and they will be getting better and better as they become more widely adopted.
Microsoft vs Google
Back to Microsoft and Google - Microsoft have invested in OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT and have been working with the technology in the background for some time, but chose this week to announce that the tech would be integrated into its search engine Bing, like in the opening screenshot. This has caused quite a ripple to run through the normally still waters of Google-dominated Internet search. In reality Microsoft has made the announcement, but although there are some fixed examples of how this would work, it is not yet open to be used by anyone. At Bing, you can sign up to be added to a waitlist of testers, who will get early access to the full version.
This is no doubt because Microsoft is anxious about the technology and whether it will work well and needs to do more testing. There is the possibility of reputational damage if results are found to be poor, misleading or as has happened before, the AI pushes out discriminatory information or other statements that people find offensive.
Google has also been held back I would think by the same concerns. In a rare misstep by the giant search company, Google has allowed Microsoft to seem like they are ahead in their use of AI in search. As a spoiler, the day before Microsoft’s announcement. Google announced they would soon be releasing their own AI chat assistant called Bard powered by their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).
I think it is fair to assume that Google were not planning to make this announcement at this time and were rushed into doing so by Microsoft’s move to trumpet their enhancements to Bing. Despite these competing “launches” the reality is that both companies have been working on this technology for years. Google acquired British AI company Deep Mind in 2014 and of course already uses elements of AI behind the scenes of its search engine and in areas such as speech or image and video recognition.
New Search Pages and Ad Formats
What we have now though is quite an exciting prospect as both companies compete to get the upper hand as a new generation of search technology using AI comes to the surface in search engines and in their other products such as maps and video. In fact Google was quick to roll out its own AI announcements in an event in Paris the day after Microsoft’s grand reveal, where it described enhancements to Google Maps, Google Translate and other AI features.
Bing will be able to steal a bit of a march on Google and naturally this will revive some interest in Bing, which suffers in comparison to Google’s 90 plus per cent share of the search engine market in most countries around the world. However, I think Google’s massive presence in most people’s online lives, the brand and the power of its technology means that this could be a short-lived PR victory for Microsoft and Google will remain the leader in the space in the short to medium term. Shout out to challenger search engine Neeva, developed by former Google engineers, who already have some AI features launched.
What is certain though is the way the search page looks and the way we use it is undergoing a lot of change at the moment and real competition is good news for users and brands, if it drives speedy innovation. There will also be questions over monetisation, as a conversational chat-style interface for search may be harder to monetise for Google, so there is a threat to their revenue from that and perhaps a bonus to Bing if advertisers and users are attracted to re-try their search engine. New ad formats could also shake up the familiar Google home page and provide new options for advertisers.
What We Have Been Doing
I enjoyed speaking to Amy Lishman from Brighton Chamber in January to kick off the year with some thoughts about digital trends and common mistakes that companies make with their digital marketing. You can see a summary blog here or watch the video above.
In other news, I will be acting as an Ambassador for Digital Futures West Sussex during 2023. This is a programme sponsored by West Sussex County Council and all the Borough and District Councils across West Sussex, with the aim of promoting digital careers to both companies and individuals. I will be focussing on the Crawley and Mid Sussex areas and there are two other Ambassadors for the rest of the county. Look out for a series of events in every part of West Sussex from information hubs for job seekers or switchers to larger roadshows with speakers and exhibitors from local businesses.
For more information, to get involved and sign up for event updates, go to the Digital Futures website. or get in touch with me.
Google Ads Audits
We have done a few Google Ads audits so far this year. If you are managing Google Ads in house or with an agency, you might want to have a third party look through your current keywords, ads and targeting to see if your campaigns are properly set up for success. If you have poor performance, the agency is reluctant to let you have full transparency on your campaigns or they are just a bit stuck on keeping the activity fresh and as efficient as possible, then it could be a good time for a change. Also if you are struggling to keep on top of the account or don’t understand the latest ad products from Google then we can help take that responsibility from you or at least give you some pointers on how to improve.
Get in touch with barney@bluebelldigital.co.uk to tap into our 20 years of experience creating and managing top performing Google Ads accounts.
A Reminder on Google Analytics
Don’t ignore GA4 - the new version of Google Analytics is here and Google are planning to cut off the current version in July of THIS YEAR, so now is the time to formulate your plans to transfer across to GA4. This might involve your internal webmaster, your website agency and anyone who will be impacted by this change - could be internal data analysts, your marketing team and any external marketing agencies or consultants. There are some technical elements to this depending on what you are currently tracking or want to track in the future. Don’t delay as this needs actioning in the next few months.