Google’s AI Bard is a work in progress. Everyday it seems to be improving. This article is about prompting Bard to provide URLs in its responses.
Until recently, if prompting Bard to provide a URLs, it would respond with some variant of:
I’m not able to help with that, as I’m only a language model.
However, now it seems if you prompt Bard a specific way, it can respond with URLs.
From my experiments, when prompting Bard for links, it is better to specify where Bard is to search for the links. As an example below, I first prompted Bard to respond with links from Wikipedia. Then I asked it to provide links about NASA without specifying where it should get those links from.
I’ve found Bard to be more consistent at responding with links if you specify where it should get them from.
Input:
Provide me a link to a Wikipedia article about airfoils.
Output:
Sure, here is the link to the Wikipedia article about airfoils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil
Input:
Provide me a link to a Wikipedia article about plants.
Output:
Sure, here is the link to the Wikipedia article about plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant
Input:
Provide me multiple links to Wikipedia articles about plants.
Output:
Here are some links to Wikipedia articles about plants:
Plant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant
List of plants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_plants
Category:Plants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Plants
Portal:Plants - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Plants
Input:
Provide me links to NASA articles about rockets.
Output:
Sure, here are some links to NASA articles about rockets:
What Is a Rocket? - https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-rocket-k4.html
NASA Rockets to Search for Swirls at the Edge of Space - https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/sun/nasa-rockets-to-search-for-swirls-at-the-edge-of-space
Space Launch System - https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/index.html
Rocketology: NASA's Space Launch System - https://blogs.nasa.gov/Rocketology/tag/nasa-rocket/
These articles provide information about the different types of rockets that NASA uses, as well as the history of rocket development.Bard is still unstable with its responses. Especially when prompting Bard for multiple links. Sometimes, Bard will respond with a list of links and other times it will respond with a summary that does not include links. But most of the time, Bard responds with:
I’m not able to help with that, as I’m only a language model.
After prompting Bard, be sure to click through the “View other drafts” drop-down in the upper-right corner of the response dialog. When Bard does respond, sometimes the response that includes the URLs is hidden as an alternate draft.
Google is improving Bard more everyday. Now with the ability to return URLs and Images, Bard is becoming more useful.
If you are interested in prompting Bard to return images, read this article.
Happy Searching!