Renowned SEO consultant, Gagan Ghotra, recently discovered URL errors linking users to Bard’s discussion page, which appeared as Google search results. These URLs contained queries from users seeking information about Bard, such as what to remember when encountering a statue in Singapore or how to use Bard to enhance writing skills. Clicking on these links allowed users to view the conversation history of other Bard users.
To address this issue, Peter Liu, a researcher at Google DeepMind, responded on Twitter, clarifying that the conversation snippets shown in search results are solely intended for sharing purposes and are not public by default.
Simon Willison, an AI critic and dataset creator, commented that link sharing should provide an option to limit visibility only to users who have access to the links. He compared this situation to ChatGPT, which has a similar sharing button but uses HTML to block shared content from appearing on search engines from the beginning. Willison further noted that Google Bard failed to implement this feature, exposing conversation histories on Google Search.
Following these discussions, Google Search Liaison, an official Google account, responded to Gagan Ghotra’s tweet, stating that they did not intend for these chat conversations to be displayed on Google Search and that they are actively working to rectify the situation. It is important to note that only explicitly shared conversations are meant to be displayed. By default, conversations remain private.
TLDR: Gagan Ghotra, an SEO consultant, discovered that Bard’s chat conversations were erroneously displayed on Google Search. Despite not being intended for public visibility, these conversations were visible to users. Peter Liu from Google DeepMind explained that the snippets shown in search results were only meant for sharing purposes, and Simon Willison criticized Google Bard for not implementing privacy options. Google Search Liaison confirmed that steps were being taken to address the issue, emphasizing that private conversations should remain private.
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