Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Regarding books, maybe @JeffJarvis should talk to TWiT irregular Will Harris at Unbound, they do worldwide distribution of books and a form of crowd funding as well. I’ve bought a few books from them over the years, they are excellent.
I signed up as an supporter for one book and was supposed to get a copy signed by the author. An unsigned copy turned up, one quick email and 2 days later, I had a signed copy as well. I donated the other copy to the local library’s English book section.
As to the conversation, I was a little surprised at Jeff jumping to defend Google as not being left behind in the AI search race, before @Leo could even finish furnishing the background to the story. Google themselves called a “code red” (am I the only one who knows that phrase in the context of “A Few Good Men”?) to get themselves up to speed, as they were caught napping.
I would say, that it is a good thing that Google are being shaken awake. They certainly won’t become irrelevant over night - their advertising income will see to that - but they seem to have lost their way on search over recent years. Because of their advertising bias, it is often the case that the “top” search results are absolutely irrelevant to the search entered.
If I search for “handbook for Siemens washing machine” or, even better, “Siemens washing machine error code”, for example, the first page of results is usually full of adverts for people selling washing machines, price comparison sites and, maybe, the corporate home page. Actual relevant results often start towards the bottom of the page and it is often the 2nd or 3rd page that is the real start of the “search results”.
This isn’t unique to Google. I was searching on Amazon for Gießwein slippers for my wife, in the first 20 results, 3 pairs of slippers were from the manufacturer I specifically entered! Even after I filtered on make to only be Gießwein, I had to skip over half a dozen ads for other brands, before I got to what I was looking for!
Apple is also bad, setting up my iPhone and iPad, I searched for 1Password, the top result was LastPass! Literally, I entered the brand name and product name, and the first result isn’t the 100% match, that is the second entry. The same for Microsoft Teams, the top match for MS Teams is Zoom!
If I was searching for washing machines, slippers or “chat clients”, I wouldn’t mind seeing other results turning up. But if I am searching for a specific brand or a specific app and I give a 100% match, I want results that correspond to what I searched for as the first match! Likewise, if I am searching for error codes or a handbook for a product, I am probably not in the mood to buy a new version of the thing that is playing up, I want to find out what is wrong with the one I have!
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In regards to self-driving cars, inaction is as deliberate and meaningful a choice as action. Either you kill ten people to save a million or you kill a million people to save ten: there is no option that washes our collective hands of the responsibility.
The status quo of human drivers is extremely dangerous. Self-driven cars could never come close to that level of lethality, as long as their safety is duly regulated.
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If I search for “handbook for Siemens washing machine” or, even better, “Siemens washing machine error code”…
Maybe give Bing a go David 
1st match for all of those queries.
I’ve actually got the Bing widget on my phone instead of the Google one as I find you get less of the pushing paid results up to the top of your search results.
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It would, if it could do a good job with foreign language search. Its German is woeful, compared to the Google, for example. Although I’ve been mainly using DDG the last few years, or Ecosia.
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