Google Bard adds genuine citations in responses and more concise summaries

Google Bard has added classic and more genuine citations to the answers it provides and also is able to provide better summarization. We do not yet see these improvements and enhancements live yet but Jack Krawczyk from Google shared some examples on Twitter.

Citations improved. Google Bard now shows sources with numbers, like true citations, next to the responses. You can click on the numbers to see the source for that information. “Bard can now help you identify which parts of a response match a source. For the responses with sources, you’ll see numbers alongside the response. By clicking on the numbers you will now be able to identify the section of the text that matches the source and easily navigate to it.,” Google posted in the Bard changelog.

Here is a screenshot from Jack Krawczyk showing the numbers on the left side, with a “learn more” linked below.

Concise summaries. Google also updated Bard with more advancements to its large language models to get better at providing better summarizations for answers. ” Bard is “better at summarizing information, which is especially helpful when you want to get the gist of a topic quickly,” they posted in the Bard changelog.

Here is a screenshot from Jack Krawczyk showing the summary:

Why we care. Citations and links to sources are a big concern for publishers and the overall web ecosystem. Google is trying to address some of that with this update to offer more links in the Google Bard responses. Also, better summarizations with improvements to the LLMs Google has is useful and exciting to see, especially over time.

Postscript. I found a few examples of citations, they are hard to find and they are not as good as Bing Chat just yet. Here is one example and the page Bard links to has not existed in over a year, according to the Wayback Machine.