An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra observed that Google Search had begun to index shared Bard conversational links into its search results pages, potentially exposing information users meant to be kept contained or confidential. This means that if a person used Bard to ask it a question -- possibly even a question related to the contents of their private emails -- then shared the link with a designated third-party, say, their spouse, friend or business partner, the conversation accessible at that link could in turn be scraped by Google's crawler and show up publicly, to the entire world, in its Search Results.

Google Brain research scientist Peter J. Liu replied to Ghotra on X by noting that the Google Search indexing only occurred for those conversations that users had elected to click the share link on, not all Bard conversations, to which Ghotra patiently explained: "Most users wouldn't be aware of the fact that shared conversation mean it would be indexed by Google and then show up in SERP, most people even I was thinking of it as a feature to share conversation with some friend or colleague & it being just visible to people who have conversation URL."

Ultimately, Google's Search Liaison account on X, which provides "insights on how Google Search works," wrote back to Ghotra to say "Bard allows people to share chats, if they choose. We also don't intend for these shared chats to be indexed by Google Search. We're working on blocking them from being indexed now."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eddy Cue, in a dark suit, peered down at the monitor in front of him. The screens in the Washington, DC, courtroom had briefly malfunctioned and left witnesses with only binders, but now the tech was up and running -- showing an image of three iPhones, each demonstrating a part of the phone's setup process. Cue squinted down at the screen. "The resolution on this is terrible," he said. "You should get a Mac." That got some laughs in an otherwise staid and quiet courtroom. Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the case, leaned into his microphone and responded, "If Apple would like to make a donation..." That got even bigger laughs. Then everybody got back down to business.

Cue was on the stand as a witness in US v. Google, the landmark antitrust trial over Google's search business. Cue is one of the highest-profile witnesses in the case so far, in part because the deal between Google and Apple -- which makes Google the default search engine on all Apple devices and pays Apple billions of dollars a year -- is central to the US Department of Justice's case against Google. Cue had two messages: Apple believes in protecting its users' privacy, and it also believes in Google. Whether those two statements can be simultaneously true became the question of the day.

Apple is in court because of something called the Information Services Agreement, or ISA: a deal that makes Google's search engine the default on Apple's products. The ISA has been in place since 2002, but Cue was responsible for negotiating its current iteration with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2016. In testimony today, the Justice Department grilled Cue about the specifics of the deal. When the two sides renegotiated, Cue said on the stand, Apple wanted a higher percentage of the revenue Google made from Apple users it directed toward the search engine. [...] Meagan Bellshaw, a Justice Department lawyer, asked Cue if he would have walked away from the deal if the two sides couldn't agree on a revenue-share figure. Cue said he'd never really considered that an option: "I always felt like it was in Google's best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done." Cue also argued that the deal was about more than economics and that Apple never seriously considered switching to another provider or building its own search product. "Certainly there wasn't a valid alternative to Google at the time," Cue said. He said there still isn't one.

Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals. The Register reports: On Thursday, the company said that image and video results from Brave Search -- available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser -- will be served from Brave's own index. Search indexes are made by visiting online resources -- typically web pages, images, videos, or other files -- with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea.

Brave now aims to ride the wave of discontent with "Big Tech" by highlighting its commitment to privacy and independence â" small tech. "Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous, which sets a high bar for image/video search to meet," the company said in a blog post provided to The Register. "Whether it's a matter of personal safety or personal preference, users should be able to discover content without their search engine reporting and profiling those results to a Big Tech company." [...] Brave argues that having its own index frees the company from content decisions made by others. "Brave is on a mission to build a user-first Web," the company said in its blog post. "That mission starts with the Brave browser and Brave Search. With the release of image and video search, we're continuing to innovate within the search industry, providing viable and preferable products for users who want choice and transparency in their search for information online."

Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. From a report: The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search. All this takes place from Google's "results about you" dashboard on mobile and web, which it first rolled out last September. With the update, you can find your information on Google without actually having to conduct the search yourself. Once you input your personal information, the dashboard will automatically pull up websites that contain any matches, letting you review each webpage it appears on and then submit a request to remove it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, responded to Vox Media's claim that AI content is currently "well-received by search engines." Sullivan said, "It's still not correct that AI content will be "well-received by search engines," at least for us." Sullivan went on to explain on Twitter that "There's lots of AI content on the web that doesn't rank well and hence isn't well received" by Google Search. "AI content has no magic ranking powers," Sullivan said. Only "if content is helpful, then it might succeed," but not because AI wrote it does it mean the content is helpful.

Sullivan wrote to the author, "FYI about this part: "he's learned that AI content 'will, at least for the moment, be well-received by search engines'." This isn't correct. Our systems are looking at the helpfulness of content, rather than how it is produced," Danny Sullivan clarified. "We'd encourage publishers, however they produce content, to ensure they're making it for people-first," he added. "Producing a lot of content with the primary purpose of ranking in search, rather than for people, should be avoided. Sites producing a lot of unhelpful content not intended for people-first may find all of their content less likely to be successful with search," he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Search's dominance has created a cottage industry of SEO professionals who promise to share their lucrative tricks to climb to the top of search results. From YouTubers to firms peddling proprietary tools, SEO hustlers propagate a never-ending stream of marketing content that floods Search. Some companies sell tools that allow marketers to mass-produce and distribute blog posts, press releases, and even robot-narrated podcast materials, with the purpose of creating backlinks -- a signal that Google uses to rank content in Search. Small businesses must decide if they'll try to learn SEO practices themselves or pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have a marketing firm do it for them.

While other platforms are still nowhere close to overtaking Search, entrepreneurs like Dziura, who sells feminist gifts, are taking note of how people are (or aren't) using Google. Now, any retailer, big or small, can add more text to their website without a team of copywriters, and given AI's tendency to generate falsehoods, there's even less guarantee that what consumers are reading is real. It's why people append "reddit" to the end of searches -- they want an actual answer or opinion, not one mediated by a search ranking algorithm. Dziura specifically notes the trend of young people using TikTok for Google-able things and has seen shoppers flocking to TikTok, Reels, or live shopping events. People like videos and product shots with hands holding items. If shoppers want candid shots and videos of products, Dziura will give them that.

Brave has launched its Brave Search API, allowing third parties to integrate its privacy-preserving and ad-free search results into their applications through a simple API call. Thurrott reports: Brave notes that its Search API is inexpensive and that it's a great fit for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models developers in particular because it provides access to a collection of high-quality, Web-scale data including recent events. Brave claims that its standalone Brave Search offering now delivers over 8 billion annualized queries, which makes it the fastest-growing search engine since Microsoft Bing. And in sharp contrast to the market leaders, Brave Search is private and transparent. Plus, it's fueled by opt-in users of the Brave browser's Web Discovery Project, which adds millions of new web pages to the index every single day and keeps it current and fresh. The Brave web browser has over 60 million active users now, the company adds.

A free version of the Brave Search API provides one search query per second and up to 2,000 queries per month. Paid tiers start at $3 CPM (cost per one thousand) for 20 queries per second and up to 20 million queries per month, with access to web search, Goggles, news cluster, and videos cluster, plus added cost access to autosuggest and spellcheck at $5 per 10,000 requests. Higher-price tiers add more queries per second and per month, plus additional capabilities like schema-enriched web results, infobox, FAQ, discussions, locations, and more.

Google's "Search Generative Experience" is a plan to put ChatGPT-style generative AI results right in your Google search results page, and the company announced the feature is beginning to roll out today. At least, the feature is rolling out to the mobile apps for people who have been on the waitlist and were chosen as early access users. From a report: Unlike the normally stark-white Google page with 10 blue links, Google's generative AI results appear in colorful boxes above the normal search results. Google will scrape a bunch of information from all over the Internet and present it in an easy list, with purchase links to Best Buy and manufacturers' websites. If this ever rolls out widely, it would be the biggest change to Google Search results ever, and this design threatens to upend the entire Internet. One example screenshot of a "Bluetooth speaker" search on desktop shows a big row of "Sponsored" shopping ads, then the generative AI results start to show up in a big blue box about halfway down the first page. The blue box summarizes a bunch of information harvested from somewhere and lists several completely unsourced statements and opinions about each speaker. In Google's example, users are never told where this information comes from, so they can't make any judgment as to its trustworthiness.

Samsung Electronics won't be swapping out the default search engine on its smartphones from Google to Microsoft's Bing any time soon, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Samsung, the world's largest smartphone maker, has suspended an internal review that had explored replacing Google with Bing on its mobile devices, the people said. The potential switch would have swapped out Google as the go-to search engine on Samsung's "Internet" web-browsing app, which comes preinstalled on the South Korean company's smartphones. Any imminent breakup would have handed Bing a coveted victory in a search-engine space that has long been dominated by Alphabet-owned Google. This year, Bing gained some fresh momentum as it adopted the features of ChatGPT, the chatbot that has surged in popularity and is run by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

"The AI takeover of Google Search starts now," writes The Verge's David Pierce. At Google I/O today, the company demoed a new opt-in feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The new experience generates AI "snapshots" that appear at the top of the search results page consisting of an AI-generated summary about your query, with links to sources of information and shopping. From the report: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. "Why is sourdough bread still so popular?" she writes and hits enter. Google's normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase "Generative AI is experimental." A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says "corroborates" what's in the summary.

Google calls this the "AI snapshot." All of it is by Google's large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google's designers call "the bear claw," which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it's key to the way Google's AI implementation is different. "We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?"

A few seconds later, Reid clicks back and starts another search. This time, she searches for the best Bluetooth speakers for the beach. Again, standard search results appear almost immediately, and again, AI results are generated a few seconds later. This time, there's a short summary at the top detailing what you should care about in such a speaker: battery life, water resistance, sound quality. Links to three buying guides sit off to the right, and below are shopping links for a half-dozen good options, each with an AI-generated summary next to it. I ask Reid to follow up with the phrase "under $100," and she does so. The snapshot regenerates with new summaries and new picks. "This is the new look of Google's search results page," concludes Pierce. "It's AI-first, it's colorful, and it's nothing like you're used to. It's powered by some of Google's most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media."

"In the demos I saw, it's often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you'll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results."

DuckDuckGo announced a new tool called DuckAssist that "automatically pulls and summarizes information from Wikipedia in response to certain questions," reports The Verge. From the report: DuckAssist's beta is live on the search engine right now -- but only through DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, says the company will add it to the web-based search engine if the trial "goes well." When you enter a question that DuckAssist can help with, you'll see a box that says "I can check to see if Wikipedia has relevant info on this topic, just ask" at the very top of your search results. Hit the blue "Ask" button, and you'll get an AI-generated answer using summarized information from Wikipedia. If DuckAssist has already answered a question once before, that response will automatically appear, which means you won't have to "ask" it the same thing multiple times.

While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.

Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. From a report: This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI's generative image generator. The company didn't say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the "very latest DALL-E models." Dubbed the "Bing Image Creator," this new capability is now (slowly) rolling out to users in the Bing preview and will only be available through Bing's Creative Mode. It'll come to Bing's Balanced and Precise modes in the future.

The new image generator will also be available in the Edge sidebar. The right prompts will generate the now-familiar square of four high-res DALL-E images. There's one major difference, though: there will be a small Bing logo in the bottom left corner. The early Bing AI release was missing a few guardrails, but Microsoft quickly fixed those. The company is clearly hoping to avoid these issues with this release.

Thomas Claburn writes via The Register: GitHub has a lot of code to search -- more than 200 million repositories -- and says last November's beta version of a search engine optimized for source code that has caused a "flurry of innovation." GitHub engineer Timothy Clem explained that the company has had problems getting existing technology to work well. "The truth is from Solr to Elasticsearch, we haven't had a lot of luck using general text search products to power code search," he said in a GitHub Universe video presentation. "The user experience is poor. It's very, very expensive to host and it's slow to index." In a blog post on Monday, Clem delved into the technology used to scour just a quarter of those repos, a code search engine built in Rust called Blackbird.

Blackbird currently provides access to almost 45 million GitHub repositories, which together amount to 115TB of code and 15.5 billion documents. Shifting through that many lines of code requires something stronger than grep, a common command line tool on Unix-like systems for searching through text data. Using ripgrep on an 8-core Intel CPU to run an exhaustive regular expression query on a 13GB file in memory, Clem explained, takes about 2.769 seconds, or 0.6GB/sec/core. [...] At 0.01 queries per second, grep was not an option. So GitHub front-loaded much of the work into precomputed search indices. These are essentially maps of key-value pairs. This approach makes it less computationally demanding to search for document characteristics like the programming language or word sequences by using a numeric key rather than a text string. Even so, these indices are too large to fit in memory, so GitHub built iterators for each index it needed to access. According to Clem, these lazily return sorted document IDs that represent the rank of the associated document and meet the query criteria.

To keep the search index manageable, GitHub relies on sharding -- breaking the data up into multiple pieces using Git's content addressable hashing scheme and on delta encoding -- storing data differences (deltas) to reduce the data and metadata to be crawled. This works well because GitHub has a lot of redundant data (e.g. forks) -- its 115TB of data can be boiled down to 25TB through deduplication data-shaving techniques. The resulting system works much faster than grep -- 640 queries per second compared to 0.01 queries per second. And indexing occurs at a rate of about 120,000 documents per second, so processing 15.5 billion documents takes about 36 hours, or 18 for re-indexing since delta (change) indexing reduces the number of documents to be crawled.

Google is introducing a new online safety feature to help users avoid inadvertently seeing graphically violent or pornographic images while using its search engine. From a report: Announced as part of the company's Safer Internet Day event on Tuesday, the new default setting enabled for everyone will automatically blur explicit images that appear in search results, even for users that don't have SafeSearch enabled. Google has confirmed to The Verge that, should they wish, signed-in users over 18 will be able to disable the blur setting entirely after it launches in "the coming months."

People in Europe can get Google to delete search results about them if they prove the information is "manifestly inaccurate," the EU's top court has ruled. From a report: The case kicked off when two investment managers requested Google to dereference results of a search made on the basis of their names, which provided links to certain articles criticising that group's investment model. They say those articles contain inaccurate claims. Google refused to comply, arguing that it was unaware whether the information contained in the articles was accurate or not. But in a ruling Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union opened the door to the investment managers being able to successfully trigger the so-called "right to be forgotten" under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. "The right to freedom of expression and information cannot be taken into account where, at the very least, a part -- which is not of minor importance -- of the information found in the referenced content proves to be inaccurate," the court said in a press release accompanying the ruling.