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I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely a

I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. It's now very difficult to find good original information because it's overwhelmed with spam. Whether that be websites that copy that original information but pushes you through a maze of adverts, serving you what looks like original information but is actually just manufactured content, or straight up astroturf. All of these effects work to make real original work less economical and less valuable - it has no value if no one can find it. If you do something worthwhile on the internet it'll be stolen and no one will care anyway, because no one will beleive it. Now ChatGPT is 1 further step of intermediation. No longer are you competing with everyone else to get noticed by Google search, hoping Google actually has an incentive to bring people to your valuable page. No, now ChatGPT will just serve your stuff to the customer, having stolen your stuff wholesale with no chance of ever actually referencing you. Given that new situation why would anyone ever produce any text of value for the internet? Why? To pump MSFT share price? Well you won't. So what will be produced? Massive amounts (even more) of trash information will be pumped out, raising the noise floor and in turn bringing down the quality of ChatGPT, and who's to say what's right! The whole point of Google was to figure out what was right from the organic structure of the internet, but if you replace the organic structure with Google and ChatGPT there's no one left providing the original information that these services will use.

pishpash 4y ago
It's a good point that the organic structure that PageRank or whatever relied on and that used to exist may not exist any more. The same question has been asked about what happens when everyone uses index funds, and the answer is probably the same. You have to pay the organic structure creators with some incentives. Maybe if Google/Bing/ChatGPT discovers some data that increases its accuracy it should be forced to pass on some money to the data source.
sublinear 4y ago
To reference the most recent post of the "you will" AT&T ads from the early 90s, perhaps they were right to split things every significant activity into appliances and Google was wrong. If consumer experiences were broken up like that there would be less incentive to inadvertently hurt the precious AI models.
koonsolo 4y ago
I think Google PageRank has lost the SEO battle. My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain people. I trust Paul Graham on the topic 'startups', so anything that he writes on the topic is considered a high pagerank for me. Paul can also trust other people on the 'startup' topic, and so they will automatically be ranked high on my pagerank (for that topic!). When I do a search, it takes into account the people that I trust on certain topics. Please steal my idea and make millions!!!
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  How does discovery work in this case (i.e. how do you find Paul Graham in the first place)?
  - nihilius 4y ago
    Cause Paul tagged his trusted people. Sounds like everybody knows everybody around two corners like on LinkedIn. This could create another form of SEO Tag Spam.
    - jhoelzel 4y ago
      yey ID based internet ;)
  - kolinko 4y ago
    People mentioning other people, friends telling you about stuff. For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
    - gobfood 4y ago
      That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.
remarkEon 4y ago
Hijacking the current top comment, because I want to highlight something. >I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. "Search" for me doesn't really take place on google anymore, but myself and anyone else here who is in the same boat is an outlier. So has the idea at Google become that "search" has just evolved to giving "the masses" (i.e. the non-technical people) SEO garbage?
- not1ofU 4y ago
  Short answer is yes, found somewhere within this video [0]. Originally google didnt want to do ads in search at all for this very reason (supposedly) [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s
  - lioeters 4y ago
    > Originally google didnt want to do ads in search Sergey Brin and Larry Page on how advertising-supported business models negatively impact the quality of search results in commercial search engines, presented while students at Stanford University in conjunction with their Google prototype of a large-scale search engine: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. From: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
janalsncm 4y ago
I don’t think many people primarily think of their Web 2.0 content as valuable, even if you tell them it is. The value is a byproduct of use, and this will continue as long as people still enjoy creating content. Content that is deeply engaging will always have value. Content that is simply the upteenth regurgitation of a canonical source (recipes and API documentation come to mind) will be displaced by a source that just answers the damn question. What could cause a major problem for search engines is the balkanization of the internet from Web 1.0 personal sites to Web 2.0 shared (but still indexable) platforms to mostly unindexable private groups. Discord, and Whatsapp are models for how this might happen. What might cause an acceleration in that direction? Bots. ChatGPT can create content that is authentic-looking, and if open forums become Markets for Lemons [1] then people will move to trusted groups like smaller chat groups. (The other alternative is verifying identities which will happen but has privacy issues.) [1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...
- anileated 4y ago
  The danger of the likes of ChatGPT is that this enjoyment of content creation largely hinges on humans entertaining the notion of other humans reading said content, as opposed to accessing it in an anonymized scraped form via an LLM—I can’t see how mass adoption of copyright-laundering LLMs would not lead to a balkanized internet with mostly closed, unindexable knowledge.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Spam is actually quite easy to detect. Email spam has been "tamed" on most mainstream providers - you still get some of it, but nowhere near the amounts you get on the web. The problem is that Google is not incentivised to provide you with good results for multiple reasons: * good results means not only you spend less time on the search results page, but you are less likely to click on an ad. Spam results make the ads more attractive in comparison and may solicit more clicks. * spam sites often contain Google Ads and/or Analytics, so spam results also indirectly contribute to Google's revenue. * websites (whether spam or not) are relatively more likely to pay Google (for ads, analytics, GTM, etc) than end-users, so even a 1% false positive rate on the spam detection would be bad for business, where as feeding spam search results to end-users doesn't affect business at all as long as the search engine is free and there's no good competition Spam results are trivial to detect should there be an incentive to do so: use the presence of ads, analytics or affiliate links as a negative ranking signal. Spam sites can't easily conceal those either because the same techniques they'd use are also used for ad fraud and would be forbidden by their advertisers/affiliates/etc.
- johndough 4y ago
  Spam has been tamed, but at what cost? I now have to pay for a commercial service to deliver my mail because jumping though all the hoops to get the mails from my own mail server accepted by major email providers is just not worth it anymore.
- herbst 4y ago
  I've run a email related service for a while. It was a constant battle with spam, scam and infrastructure attacks for more spam. It's not tamed at all, at best it's hidden for a part of the users but in reality there is far more spam than actual emails.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > at best it's hidden for a part of the users But that's still better than the current situation with regards to SEO and web spam?
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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comfypotato 4y ago
And here I take a moment to express gratitude that I found an oasis of safe recommendations in the form of HN comments. I discovered the ecobee thermostat in the comment section of a post about home automation yesterday. It’s nice to know (based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) that it’s a solid product. That kind of thing has gotten to be next to impossible to produce organically with Google.
- hansworst 4y ago
  That's a very big assumption you're making. Not saying it's necessarily false, but I think it's probably wise to remember you're literally commenting on a platform run by a venture capital company. It doesn't take that much effort to create an account here. Who's to say the comment you're replying to wasn't written by ChatGPT?
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    I’m pulling from experience at this point. I’ve picked up at least one Emacs package, for example, from an HN comment that has changed my life for the better. Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming. I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually ends up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie). I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
    - xorcist 4y ago
      I think the point the above poster is trying to make is that "the community" could very well be a couple of thousand GPT states. We will see more of this in the future, not less. What scares me a little is that the venture capital behind both ChatGPT and similar products is going to want a return on their investment, and morally questionable "content" is the obvious low hanging fruit here. Any betterment of mankind type of outcome is much further in the future. A coming recession would make this inevitable as early capital dries up first. The real twist of this story would be if GPT-style automatons are used on both sides of the consumer divide. It's easy to imagine building more sophisticated ad watchers, thereby creating a closed loop of advertisements slowly sucking the economic value out of the system.
autonomousErwin 4y ago
I agree that the trash information needs combating (though it won't look like trash to humans!). I suppose this is where the tug of war between AI content and detection of AI content will begin which will raise the bar of what you write on the internet. I also wonder if this will in-fact "split" the web into two: users who care whether the content is authentic and original and users who don't and every website will now have to cater to both sets depending on their customer demographic.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > users who care whether the content is authentic and original and users who don't and every website will now have to cater to both sets depending on their customer demographic. I doubt it's possible to feed both from the same well, for the same reasons that news sites are split and social media is balkanising; people get upset if you they think you're lying to them. Now, you can keep them from realizing this to a certain extent, but once you mix fraudulent and non-fraudulent information the people who care about that trust none of it .. and the people who came because they're cult members for the false information will also distrust it.
cm2187 4y ago
But mostly it breaks the source of the information. If you get an answer to a question, the immediate follow up should be "says who?". Certainly very problematic for anything controversial. But even mundane things, how do you know the information you get is from an authoritative source rather than some second hand, stale source on the internet.
blackhaz 4y ago
That's the dream, isn't it? A bunch of people wearing sunglasses sitting in a skyscraper earning gazillions of dollars on making common folks interact with their programs, and those programs writing themselves to produce more programs. I wonder if we are back to the age of curated encyclopedias? Zion, hear me!
jayant_kaushik 4y ago
Would you stop visiting hacker news even though ChatGPT is using the content from its pages? NO. People won’t stop visits to their fav sites just because ChatGPT is there. However, the biggest problem would be faced by new websites/blogs that aren’t popular and we’re using SEO till now to get the much needed traffic. So, google is a content discovery website now and ChatGPT is a Q&A website on steroids. But people can not have discussions and share opinions on ChatGPT, hence they will keep using social media, Quora, medium, Reddit, HN etc. and these would stay as the medium of content discovery and engagement. Ultimately, human progress happens when they save time.(e.g invention of wheels, cars, airplane, telephone, messaging, internet and now AI) Eventually no one can prevent AI progress. And any wise person shouldn’t. It is the progress of human specie. And If no one can prevent it, let’s embrace it with open arms and make it happen as quick as possible and advance the world further to solve even bigger problems using these advancements in tech.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > Would you stop visiting hacker news even though ChatGPT is using the content from its pages? NO. Would I stop visiting hacker news once most of the articles and comments come from ChatGPT-driven bots? Yes. And how are we to avoid that happening?
  - kuboble 4y ago
    I think via regulation. Two hundred years ago it would be hard to imagine that everyone would be registered in a central database and will need an ID to do many things. I think eventually the internet will have to give up on the idea of anonymity and places like HN will require it's users to be proven humans. Hour do you handle with humans using gpt to post? The same way you would handle botters in online chess.
    - soco 4y ago
      Of course there are drawbacks to that central registration - anonymity as we know it gets left behind. Yes the central registration could offer also "anonymous" handles for social media daily use, but to the police and any able hackers this would be nothing.
stocknoob 4y ago
When ChatGPT drives the value of SEO to zero, people will write for the same reason they did on GeoCities in the early internet: impassioned amateurs who actually care about the topic. Why do you think people contribute to Wikipedia?
- hankman86 4y ago
  Exactly. More to this: the incentive for SEO copywriting goes away - good riddance! On the flip side, these new generative AI search engines will have to innovate on their business model as well. Google basically pays content creators in organic traffic. We don’t know what Bings new interface will look like. But I think it’s fair to assume that there will be fewer click-throughs to websites. To keep feeding the AI with quality content, there will have to be new ways to incentivise the creators. Especially those creators that do not have access to other sources of funding - think journalists. Unless of course, the AI disrupts one of journalism’s key purposes: to explain facts to us.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  How do you keep people who want to spend money on persuasion from attempting to bias the dominant search AI? Let's take an extreme example - say Exxon decides they want to spend $1 billion on influencing society in favor of the petroleum industry. They hire 10,000 freelance content writers to write 1000 articles each at $100 a pop and flood the internet over the course of several years with (everything from subtle to blatant) pro-petroleum content (nuclear's dangerous, solar will never scale, fusion's a pipe dream, wind is ugly, great new ways of recycling plastic, microplastics are actually beneficial to the human biome, a brand new low emission engine, ...). How is the scraper that ingests knowledge for the AI supposed to weed those out? It's still SEO, just at a higher level than the current mom and pop efforts.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    I completely agree that economic agents are going to try to game it at scale - it's basic human nature. On the other hand, if people complained that Google was a black box, or that as the old marketing adage goes, "advertising spend works, I just don't know which half", this might be a whole other level. So agents will try but I have no clue whether it will be economical or effective.
andy_ppp 4y ago
Could the Internet end up actually becoming naturally fragmented again (bulletin boards?) to allow people a decide on the trustworthiness of the agents that provide them with information? A more federated service that allows a page rank of each source but based from a starting point of things you trust? We almost need new vocabulary for something outside of your filter bubble that the algorithm thinks it’s important you see…
hankman86 4y ago
Agree with your first paragraph and disagree with the second: Google really has it coming. They bred the SEO industry that has essentially turned websites into SPAM. There isn’t a single website that doesn’t have you scroll through lengthy SEO-optimized bullish.. content. As for ChatGPT “stealing” content: I’d rather take the view of aggregating human knowledge as a positive. Imagine ChatGPT aggregating, summarising, weighing and dumbing down academic content. And if as a result all that knowledge became accessible by a broad audience. What could this do for the average person’s scientific literacy? Or fake news for that matter?
- palata 4y ago
  > What could this do for the average person’s scientific literacy? Or fake news for that matter? I guess not much better than when the media say "A study proves that X": it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't mean the study has any value, it doesn't mean that there is a scientific consensus. Yet people routinely consider X to be proven (see what happened in the early days of the pandemic). Add ChatGPT to the mix, and you don't even have the links to the original studies. I can totally imagine it being even worse.
- Nathanba 4y ago
  >As for ChatGPT “stealing” content: I’d rather take the view of aggregating human knowledge as a positive It may be positive for humanity in general but that wasn't really the point that was made. It's a bad incentive for the individual knowledge creators. I suppose we could argue that it's high time that knowledge is less artificially guarded behind indiviual humans and that it gets a standardized format and available for instant query. That "format" is therefore the knowledge graph/db of the chatgpt trained model. Maybe the answer here is that the AI programmers need to figure out a way to link to the original creators so that you can at least look at the source of the knowledge. Surely that should be doable. Because I may trust the ChatGPT3 bot a lot but maybe I also want to check out the forum link where it thinks it accumulated the trained data piece that resulted in its answer. And if that list of links is extremely long then so be it, show me ranked source links of 500 websites. It will be no different than looking at a google search.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
I agree. The current feedback loop between site SEO and search engine algorithms is going to get orders of magnitude more convoluted if SEO turns into the art of "getting noticed" by language models. I'd expect these models to start being run against each other, adversarially, to try to generate optimally "noticeable" information. And not just in commerce - but also in politics and organised disinformation efforts. It's really hard to see anything good coming of this, and my hope is that the reputational risk consideration (mentioned in the article) ultimately stops it.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
This is not Google's fault but the result of people trying to game the system to promote whatever it is they are promoting. Before Google the web was a lot less searchable. You had to go to Yahoo, Altavista, or similar websites and wade through pages and pages of nonsense before accidentally stumbling on a good link. Very hard to find stuff back then. The effect search has had on the internet is that we can now actually find stuff pretty easily. Of course the new thing here is that we are now mixing search and content generation. Before you had to manually create content, put it somewhere and then hope people could find their way to that content. Now people ask a question and the AI generates the content that contains the answer. AI generated content has the potential to vastly outnumber any human generated content. Trash content, is what we have already. E.g. reddit is full of it. Lots of people are addicted to spreading their nonsense there and trying to be as offensive as they can possibly be. There's also some good content there of course. With AI there will just be more of it. This is an issue both for training and for users. A model trained on nonsense will produce nonsensical content. Not good. So there's an incentive for separating the low value garbage from the high value content. Another issue is that you get feedback loops once we start training models on AI generated content. In other words, there's a need to tell what is what for effective training of models as well. A good strategy is to simply figure out reputability and nature of sources of content. You could use an AI for that. Digital signatures would help too. Trusting certain websites more than others is helpful. Some websites helpfully score and moderate their content or have people liking things to indicate it is important. So, plenty of signals to work with here. That's why Google is still pretty effective. And that's why chatgpt is mostly pretty impressive and not rehashing a lot of alternate reality nonsense from some substack/reddit. But it's definitely an arms race. The next level in this is going to be people getting more protective of their content. IMHO it's a problem that most content on the web is not signed by their authors. We have no way of doing that in a sane way currently. We have SSL certificates for domains but there's no such thing that guarantees a blob of text comes from a specific person or entity (an AI model could be signing it's generated content as well). As soon as you have this, you can start figuring out reputability and relevance to a particular question much more effectively.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
This model was flawed anyway. Why give away free information in the hopes someone will maybe click an ad or buy through some of your affiliate links? You work hard to publish useful info but someone steals it or people just find it and use it without credit or monetary compensation for you. Amazon now is in a good position to grow their books catalogue a lot. They do protect the copyright of their authors religiously. You can't publish books on Amazon with text that is already on the Internet. Neither can you publish text that is already available in another book on Amazon.
solarkraft 4y ago
> So what will be produced? The financial incentive is what started the spam problem in the first place. Remove it and you have a system in which content is produced by people who gain something other than money for it - like on the early internet. I would welcome that. Of course the lack of attribution remains an issue and will probably cause a bit of conflict going forward. The new type of spam will likely mostly be for the purpose of disseminating false information.
jesuscript 4y ago
It is just a question of do you take more than you give? I guess if you are Chomsky, GPT will take more from you than you give it to it. But for most of the world? Our contributions are minuscule compared to what we will take from the bucket.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  His point is that the chomskys of the world will stop writing when they just get ripped off by ai, and the ai will also degrade in time as a result. So the bucket we all take from will vanish.
  - jesuscript 4y ago
    Yeah, I’m aware of the Idiocracy take. But, Idiocracy is just a movie and Atlas Shrugged is just a book. I think we all underestimate, that in reality, there are many abstract motivators that will continue to fill that bucket (status, reputation, for example).
qwertox 4y ago
Minutes ago I was trying to root a phone (haven't done this in years) via Magisk, and Google is of no use for me. I get offered blogs which read like a template that has been auto-generated where I'm not even sure if I can trust what I'm reading. I'm being instructed to download a boot.img from a site which looks Chinese (actual Chinese) where my common sense tells me to stay away from it. I gave up. I actually started informing myself about Magisk via ChatGPT and that was very helpful. But if ChatGPT is going to start learning off of these blogs, as if it were using Google to teach itself, then we'll have an even harder time in the future, as ChatGPT will wrap that possibly wrong or even dangerous content in trustworthy sentences.
- stavros 4y ago
  For those sorts of things, I just go to Reddit directly. Also, to root your phone, you need to unlock the bootloader and then install Magisk Manager to do the actual rooting with. AFAIK you generate the boot.img via Magisk Manager and then you flash it with TWRP or similar. Reddit will definitely have some good step-by-step guides, the hardest part is finding a compatible TWRP version.
  - qwertox 4y ago
    For context, I've already flashed LineageOS on it about a year ago. I just wanted to see if I can get around the limitation of not being able to use PayPal via Google Wallet, for some reason it refuses to add it on that phone since the day I switched it to LineageOS. Thanks for the tip, I'll try my luck with Reddit.
    - stavros 4y ago
      If LineageOS has Magisk (I'm assuming it doesn't), you can use MagiskHide (it's an option in the settings, maybe called something else now) to make Wallet think everything is fine. You may also need to spoof your phone's ID, there's a package for Magisk that will do that.
- canadianfella 4y ago
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andai 4y ago
Forget the internet, why would anyone buy a book when they can just have a dialogue with an AI about the fine points of the author's worldview?
- Naga 4y ago
  I think there is still a place for books, but the age of the 200 or 300 page business/productivity porn book is over. I've often felt like they were a few pages of useful content, then 200 pages of filler so the book stands out on the shelves in a book store. I don't think there is a lot of value lost there. I use Blinkist now for a lot of those type of books, so the future is already here in many ways.
maxZZzzz 4y ago
Also they note that ChatGPT is familiar with the World up to around mid 2021. This is the world before ChatGPT. Eventually they will have to update it. How do you separate pristine Information from ChatGPT Information during training? If not addressed properly this will raise the noise level even further.
visarga 4y ago
People don't write just for monetary reward, and the content cranked up for profit is most of the time shit. Approximate attribution is possible, just find the most similar training examples to the generated content. Language models on top of search are an opportunity to filter out the same junk and spam you complain about. I think in a few years the quality of generated content will surpass most of what humans create today. And we will have verification models that check against datasets of facts, do web searches, follow links and check for consistency. They can also extract licensing information so we can avoid copyright blunders. Training a language model to solve tasks with a search engine, especially with current day Google, with all its issues, would be an interesting project. Just define thousands of tasks, solve them with humans, then let the model learn how to use search and filter the junk in order to produce the same result. The LM will be calibrated by training on real Google to solve real tasks. It is a reinforcement learning task to invert Google's disease. Problem solving will calibrate the model.
tlogan 4y ago
The problem with google search is they do not want to eliminate spam. They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge. So here is how I think this will go: - somebody (MSTF or some startup) will make a good chatGTP/AI search. The search will be good and will address issues you pointed. - they will not make money but they will disrupt Google Search causing crisis in Google. Google will shrink and become irrelevant. - eventually that somebody from step 1 will want to make money and AI search will become crap again - and cycle will start again
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge How does a deteriorating product that people are complaining about lead to "great quarterly numbers"? Google does not benefit, in any sense beyond the immediate short-term, by providing lousy search results to customers. I think part of the problem is that the average person is unable to distinguish good from crap, and the bar for "quality" content is really low.
- konha 4y ago
  > The problem with google search is they do not want to eliminate spam. They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge. Why would shareholders value high amounts of spam in the search index?
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
We'll break off into small communities and share information that way. It's how we did it with BBSs, IRC, etc... Maybe, just maybe, the world will slow down a bit, then.
lmarcos 4y ago
Well, we could "just" avoid Google and Bing. Sure, other search engines may not be as powerful as the big ones, but it's up to us to make them more popular (they get more revenue, so they can improve their engine... We just need to pray so that they don't become Google/Bing. If they do, though, rinse and repeat)
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- deleted 4y ago
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dalbasal 4y ago
This was there from the very beginning. In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, the primitive SEO that had degraded primitive websearch. Search, media and advertising is dynamic, cat and mouse stuff... always. I wouldn't be surprised if "Language Model Optimization (TM)" is currently being invented by a drop shipper living under his basement. Measure something, act on it, and you change the thing. You have to remember that these things have symmetry. The seo is trying to help users get to his site. From their perspective, Google's anti-spam is hostile to that goal. Google is trying to serve search results. To them, SEO is a hostile attempt to prevent that.

pishpash 4y ago

It's a good point that the organic structure that PageRank or whatever relied on and that used to exist may not exist any more. The same question has been asked about what happens when everyone uses index funds, and the answer is probably the same. You have to pay the organic structure creators with some incentives. Maybe if Google/Bing/ChatGPT discovers some data that increases its accuracy it should be forced to pass on some money to the data source.

sublinear 4y ago

To reference the most recent post of the "you will" AT&T ads from the early 90s, perhaps they were right to split things every significant activity into appliances and Google was wrong. If consumer experiences were broken up like that there would be less incentive to inadvertently hurt the precious AI models.

koonsolo 4y ago

I think Google PageRank has lost the SEO battle. My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain people. I trust Paul Graham on the topic 'startups', so anything that he writes on the topic is considered a high pagerank for me. Paul can also trust other people on the 'startup' topic, and so they will automatically be ranked high on my pagerank (for that topic!). When I do a search, it takes into account the people that I trust on certain topics. Please steal my idea and make millions!!!

panosfilianos 4y ago
How does discovery work in this case (i.e. how do you find Paul Graham in the first place)?
- nihilius 4y ago
  Cause Paul tagged his trusted people. Sounds like everybody knows everybody around two corners like on LinkedIn. This could create another form of SEO Tag Spam.
  - jhoelzel 4y ago
    yey ID based internet ;)
- kolinko 4y ago
  People mentioning other people, friends telling you about stuff. For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
  - gobfood 4y ago
    That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.

remarkEon 4y ago

Hijacking the current top comment, because I want to highlight something. >I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. "Search" for me doesn't really take place on google anymore, but myself and anyone else here who is in the same boat is an outlier. So has the idea at Google become that "search" has just evolved to giving "the masses" (i.e. the non-technical people) SEO garbage?

not1ofU 4y ago
Short answer is yes, found somewhere within this video [0]. Originally google didnt want to do ads in search at all for this very reason (supposedly) [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s
- lioeters 4y ago
  > Originally google didnt want to do ads in search Sergey Brin and Larry Page on how advertising-supported business models negatively impact the quality of search results in commercial search engines, presented while students at Stanford University in conjunction with their Google prototype of a large-scale search engine: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. From: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

janalsncm 4y ago

I don’t think many people primarily think of their Web 2.0 content as valuable, even if you tell them it is. The value is a byproduct of use, and this will continue as long as people still enjoy creating content. Content that is deeply engaging will always have value. Content that is simply the upteenth regurgitation of a canonical source (recipes and API documentation come to mind) will be displaced by a source that just answers the damn question. What could cause a major problem for search engines is the balkanization of the internet from Web 1.0 personal sites to Web 2.0 shared (but still indexable) platforms to mostly unindexable private groups. Discord, and Whatsapp are models for how this might happen. What might cause an acceleration in that direction? Bots. ChatGPT can create content that is authentic-looking, and if open forums become Markets for Lemons [1] then people will move to trusted groups like smaller chat groups. (The other alternative is verifying identities which will happen but has privacy issues.) [1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...

anileated 4y ago
The danger of the likes of ChatGPT is that this enjoyment of content creation largely hinges on humans entertaining the notion of other humans reading said content, as opposed to accessing it in an anonymized scraped form via an LLM—I can’t see how mass adoption of copyright-laundering LLMs would not lead to a balkanized internet with mostly closed, unindexable knowledge.

Nextgrid 4y ago

Spam is actually quite easy to detect. Email spam has been "tamed" on most mainstream providers - you still get some of it, but nowhere near the amounts you get on the web. The problem is that Google is not incentivised to provide you with good results for multiple reasons: * good results means not only you spend less time on the search results page, but you are less likely to click on an ad. Spam results make the ads more attractive in comparison and may solicit more clicks. * spam sites often contain Google Ads and/or Analytics, so spam results also indirectly contribute to Google's revenue. * websites (whether spam or not) are relatively more likely to pay Google (for ads, analytics, GTM, etc) than end-users, so even a 1% false positive rate on the spam detection would be bad for business, where as feeding spam search results to end-users doesn't affect business at all as long as the search engine is free and there's no good competition Spam results are trivial to detect should there be an incentive to do so: use the presence of ads, analytics or affiliate links as a negative ranking signal. Spam sites can't easily conceal those either because the same techniques they'd use are also used for ad fraud and would be forbidden by their advertisers/affiliates/etc.

johndough 4y ago
Spam has been tamed, but at what cost? I now have to pay for a commercial service to deliver my mail because jumping though all the hoops to get the mails from my own mail server accepted by major email providers is just not worth it anymore.
herbst 4y ago
I've run a email related service for a while. It was a constant battle with spam, scam and infrastructure attacks for more spam. It's not tamed at all, at best it's hidden for a part of the users but in reality there is far more spam than actual emails.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > at best it's hidden for a part of the users But that's still better than the current situation with regards to SEO and web spam?
4y ago

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comfypotato 4y ago

And here I take a moment to express gratitude that I found an oasis of safe recommendations in the form of HN comments. I discovered the ecobee thermostat in the comment section of a post about home automation yesterday. It’s nice to know (based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) that it’s a solid product. That kind of thing has gotten to be next to impossible to produce organically with Google.

hansworst 4y ago
That's a very big assumption you're making. Not saying it's necessarily false, but I think it's probably wise to remember you're literally commenting on a platform run by a venture capital company. It doesn't take that much effort to create an account here. Who's to say the comment you're replying to wasn't written by ChatGPT?
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I’m pulling from experience at this point. I’ve picked up at least one Emacs package, for example, from an HN comment that has changed my life for the better. Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming. I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually ends up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie). I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    I think the point the above poster is trying to make is that "the community" could very well be a couple of thousand GPT states. We will see more of this in the future, not less. What scares me a little is that the venture capital behind both ChatGPT and similar products is going to want a return on their investment, and morally questionable "content" is the obvious low hanging fruit here. Any betterment of mankind type of outcome is much further in the future. A coming recession would make this inevitable as early capital dries up first. The real twist of this story would be if GPT-style automatons are used on both sides of the consumer divide. It's easy to imagine building more sophisticated ad watchers, thereby creating a closed loop of advertisements slowly sucking the economic value out of the system.

autonomousErwin 4y ago

I agree that the trash information needs combating (though it won't look like trash to humans!). I suppose this is where the tug of war between AI content and detection of AI content will begin which will raise the bar of what you write on the internet. I also wonder if this will in-fact "split" the web into two: users who care whether the content is authentic and original and users who don't and every website will now have to cater to both sets depending on their customer demographic.

pjc50 4y ago
> users who care whether the content is authentic and original and users who don't and every website will now have to cater to both sets depending on their customer demographic. I doubt it's possible to feed both from the same well, for the same reasons that news sites are split and social media is balkanising; people get upset if you they think you're lying to them. Now, you can keep them from realizing this to a certain extent, but once you mix fraudulent and non-fraudulent information the people who care about that trust none of it .. and the people who came because they're cult members for the false information will also distrust it.

cm2187 4y ago

But mostly it breaks the source of the information. If you get an answer to a question, the immediate follow up should be "says who?". Certainly very problematic for anything controversial. But even mundane things, how do you know the information you get is from an authoritative source rather than some second hand, stale source on the internet.

blackhaz 4y ago

That's the dream, isn't it? A bunch of people wearing sunglasses sitting in a skyscraper earning gazillions of dollars on making common folks interact with their programs, and those programs writing themselves to produce more programs. I wonder if we are back to the age of curated encyclopedias? Zion, hear me!

jayant_kaushik 4y ago

Would you stop visiting hacker news even though ChatGPT is using the content from its pages? NO. People won’t stop visits to their fav sites just because ChatGPT is there. However, the biggest problem would be faced by new websites/blogs that aren’t popular and we’re using SEO till now to get the much needed traffic. So, google is a content discovery website now and ChatGPT is a Q&A website on steroids. But people can not have discussions and share opinions on ChatGPT, hence they will keep using social media, Quora, medium, Reddit, HN etc. and these would stay as the medium of content discovery and engagement. Ultimately, human progress happens when they save time.(e.g invention of wheels, cars, airplane, telephone, messaging, internet and now AI) Eventually no one can prevent AI progress. And any wise person shouldn’t. It is the progress of human specie. And If no one can prevent it, let’s embrace it with open arms and make it happen as quick as possible and advance the world further to solve even bigger problems using these advancements in tech.

jfk13 4y ago
> Would you stop visiting hacker news even though ChatGPT is using the content from its pages? NO. Would I stop visiting hacker news once most of the articles and comments come from ChatGPT-driven bots? Yes. And how are we to avoid that happening?
- kuboble 4y ago
  I think via regulation. Two hundred years ago it would be hard to imagine that everyone would be registered in a central database and will need an ID to do many things. I think eventually the internet will have to give up on the idea of anonymity and places like HN will require it's users to be proven humans. Hour do you handle with humans using gpt to post? The same way you would handle botters in online chess.
  - soco 4y ago
    Of course there are drawbacks to that central registration - anonymity as we know it gets left behind. Yes the central registration could offer also "anonymous" handles for social media daily use, but to the police and any able hackers this would be nothing.

stocknoob 4y ago

When ChatGPT drives the value of SEO to zero, people will write for the same reason they did on GeoCities in the early internet: impassioned amateurs who actually care about the topic. Why do you think people contribute to Wikipedia?

hankman86 4y ago
Exactly. More to this: the incentive for SEO copywriting goes away - good riddance! On the flip side, these new generative AI search engines will have to innovate on their business model as well. Google basically pays content creators in organic traffic. We don’t know what Bings new interface will look like. But I think it’s fair to assume that there will be fewer click-throughs to websites. To keep feeding the AI with quality content, there will have to be new ways to incentivise the creators. Especially those creators that do not have access to other sources of funding - think journalists. Unless of course, the AI disrupts one of journalism’s key purposes: to explain facts to us.
smallerfish 4y ago
How do you keep people who want to spend money on persuasion from attempting to bias the dominant search AI? Let's take an extreme example - say Exxon decides they want to spend $1 billion on influencing society in favor of the petroleum industry. They hire 10,000 freelance content writers to write 1000 articles each at $100 a pop and flood the internet over the course of several years with (everything from subtle to blatant) pro-petroleum content (nuclear's dangerous, solar will never scale, fusion's a pipe dream, wind is ugly, great new ways of recycling plastic, microplastics are actually beneficial to the human biome, a brand new low emission engine, ...). How is the scraper that ingests knowledge for the AI supposed to weed those out? It's still SEO, just at a higher level than the current mom and pop efforts.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  I completely agree that economic agents are going to try to game it at scale - it's basic human nature. On the other hand, if people complained that Google was a black box, or that as the old marketing adage goes, "advertising spend works, I just don't know which half", this might be a whole other level. So agents will try but I have no clue whether it will be economical or effective.

andy_ppp 4y ago

Could the Internet end up actually becoming naturally fragmented again (bulletin boards?) to allow people a decide on the trustworthiness of the agents that provide them with information? A more federated service that allows a page rank of each source but based from a starting point of things you trust? We almost need new vocabulary for something outside of your filter bubble that the algorithm thinks it’s important you see…

hankman86 4y ago

Agree with your first paragraph and disagree with the second: Google really has it coming. They bred the SEO industry that has essentially turned websites into SPAM. There isn’t a single website that doesn’t have you scroll through lengthy SEO-optimized bullish.. content. As for ChatGPT “stealing” content: I’d rather take the view of aggregating human knowledge as a positive. Imagine ChatGPT aggregating, summarising, weighing and dumbing down academic content. And if as a result all that knowledge became accessible by a broad audience. What could this do for the average person’s scientific literacy? Or fake news for that matter?

palata 4y ago
> What could this do for the average person’s scientific literacy? Or fake news for that matter? I guess not much better than when the media say "A study proves that X": it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't mean the study has any value, it doesn't mean that there is a scientific consensus. Yet people routinely consider X to be proven (see what happened in the early days of the pandemic). Add ChatGPT to the mix, and you don't even have the links to the original studies. I can totally imagine it being even worse.
Nathanba 4y ago
>As for ChatGPT “stealing” content: I’d rather take the view of aggregating human knowledge as a positive It may be positive for humanity in general but that wasn't really the point that was made. It's a bad incentive for the individual knowledge creators. I suppose we could argue that it's high time that knowledge is less artificially guarded behind indiviual humans and that it gets a standardized format and available for instant query. That "format" is therefore the knowledge graph/db of the chatgpt trained model. Maybe the answer here is that the AI programmers need to figure out a way to link to the original creators so that you can at least look at the source of the knowledge. Surely that should be doable. Because I may trust the ChatGPT3 bot a lot but maybe I also want to check out the forum link where it thinks it accumulated the trained data piece that resulted in its answer. And if that list of links is extremely long then so be it, show me ranked source links of 500 websites. It will be no different than looking at a google search.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

I agree. The current feedback loop between site SEO and search engine algorithms is going to get orders of magnitude more convoluted if SEO turns into the art of "getting noticed" by language models. I'd expect these models to start being run against each other, adversarially, to try to generate optimally "noticeable" information. And not just in commerce - but also in politics and organised disinformation efforts. It's really hard to see anything good coming of this, and my hope is that the reputational risk consideration (mentioned in the article) ultimately stops it.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

This is not Google's fault but the result of people trying to game the system to promote whatever it is they are promoting. Before Google the web was a lot less searchable. You had to go to Yahoo, Altavista, or similar websites and wade through pages and pages of nonsense before accidentally stumbling on a good link. Very hard to find stuff back then. The effect search has had on the internet is that we can now actually find stuff pretty easily. Of course the new thing here is that we are now mixing search and content generation. Before you had to manually create content, put it somewhere and then hope people could find their way to that content. Now people ask a question and the AI generates the content that contains the answer. AI generated content has the potential to vastly outnumber any human generated content. Trash content, is what we have already. E.g. reddit is full of it. Lots of people are addicted to spreading their nonsense there and trying to be as offensive as they can possibly be. There's also some good content there of course. With AI there will just be more of it. This is an issue both for training and for users. A model trained on nonsense will produce nonsensical content. Not good. So there's an incentive for separating the low value garbage from the high value content. Another issue is that you get feedback loops once we start training models on AI generated content. In other words, there's a need to tell what is what for effective training of models as well. A good strategy is to simply figure out reputability and nature of sources of content. You could use an AI for that. Digital signatures would help too. Trusting certain websites more than others is helpful. Some websites helpfully score and moderate their content or have people liking things to indicate it is important. So, plenty of signals to work with here. That's why Google is still pretty effective. And that's why chatgpt is mostly pretty impressive and not rehashing a lot of alternate reality nonsense from some substack/reddit. But it's definitely an arms race. The next level in this is going to be people getting more protective of their content. IMHO it's a problem that most content on the web is not signed by their authors. We have no way of doing that in a sane way currently. We have SSL certificates for domains but there's no such thing that guarantees a blob of text comes from a specific person or entity (an AI model could be signing it's generated content as well). As soon as you have this, you can start figuring out reputability and relevance to a particular question much more effectively.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

This model was flawed anyway. Why give away free information in the hopes someone will maybe click an ad or buy through some of your affiliate links? You work hard to publish useful info but someone steals it or people just find it and use it without credit or monetary compensation for you. Amazon now is in a good position to grow their books catalogue a lot. They do protect the copyright of their authors religiously. You can't publish books on Amazon with text that is already on the Internet. Neither can you publish text that is already available in another book on Amazon.

solarkraft 4y ago

> So what will be produced? The financial incentive is what started the spam problem in the first place. Remove it and you have a system in which content is produced by people who gain something other than money for it - like on the early internet. I would welcome that. Of course the lack of attribution remains an issue and will probably cause a bit of conflict going forward. The new type of spam will likely mostly be for the purpose of disseminating false information.

jesuscript 4y ago

It is just a question of do you take more than you give? I guess if you are Chomsky, GPT will take more from you than you give it to it. But for most of the world? Our contributions are minuscule compared to what we will take from the bucket.

thatguy0900 4y ago
His point is that the chomskys of the world will stop writing when they just get ripped off by ai, and the ai will also degrade in time as a result. So the bucket we all take from will vanish.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  Yeah, I’m aware of the Idiocracy take. But, Idiocracy is just a movie and Atlas Shrugged is just a book. I think we all underestimate, that in reality, there are many abstract motivators that will continue to fill that bucket (status, reputation, for example).

qwertox 4y ago

Minutes ago I was trying to root a phone (haven't done this in years) via Magisk, and Google is of no use for me. I get offered blogs which read like a template that has been auto-generated where I'm not even sure if I can trust what I'm reading. I'm being instructed to download a boot.img from a site which looks Chinese (actual Chinese) where my common sense tells me to stay away from it. I gave up. I actually started informing myself about Magisk via ChatGPT and that was very helpful. But if ChatGPT is going to start learning off of these blogs, as if it were using Google to teach itself, then we'll have an even harder time in the future, as ChatGPT will wrap that possibly wrong or even dangerous content in trustworthy sentences.

stavros 4y ago
For those sorts of things, I just go to Reddit directly. Also, to root your phone, you need to unlock the bootloader and then install Magisk Manager to do the actual rooting with. AFAIK you generate the boot.img via Magisk Manager and then you flash it with TWRP or similar. Reddit will definitely have some good step-by-step guides, the hardest part is finding a compatible TWRP version.
- qwertox 4y ago
  For context, I've already flashed LineageOS on it about a year ago. I just wanted to see if I can get around the limitation of not being able to use PayPal via Google Wallet, for some reason it refuses to add it on that phone since the day I switched it to LineageOS. Thanks for the tip, I'll try my luck with Reddit.
  - stavros 4y ago
    If LineageOS has Magisk (I'm assuming it doesn't), you can use MagiskHide (it's an option in the settings, maybe called something else now) to make Wallet think everything is fine. You may also need to spoof your phone's ID, there's a package for Magisk that will do that.
canadianfella 4y ago
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andai 4y ago

Forget the internet, why would anyone buy a book when they can just have a dialogue with an AI about the fine points of the author's worldview?

Naga 4y ago
I think there is still a place for books, but the age of the 200 or 300 page business/productivity porn book is over. I've often felt like they were a few pages of useful content, then 200 pages of filler so the book stands out on the shelves in a book store. I don't think there is a lot of value lost there. I use Blinkist now for a lot of those type of books, so the future is already here in many ways.

maxZZzzz 4y ago

Also they note that ChatGPT is familiar with the World up to around mid 2021. This is the world before ChatGPT. Eventually they will have to update it. How do you separate pristine Information from ChatGPT Information during training? If not addressed properly this will raise the noise level even further.

visarga 4y ago

People don't write just for monetary reward, and the content cranked up for profit is most of the time shit. Approximate attribution is possible, just find the most similar training examples to the generated content. Language models on top of search are an opportunity to filter out the same junk and spam you complain about. I think in a few years the quality of generated content will surpass most of what humans create today. And we will have verification models that check against datasets of facts, do web searches, follow links and check for consistency. They can also extract licensing information so we can avoid copyright blunders. Training a language model to solve tasks with a search engine, especially with current day Google, with all its issues, would be an interesting project. Just define thousands of tasks, solve them with humans, then let the model learn how to use search and filter the junk in order to produce the same result. The LM will be calibrated by training on real Google to solve real tasks. It is a reinforcement learning task to invert Google's disease. Problem solving will calibrate the model.

tlogan 4y ago

The problem with google search is they do not want to eliminate spam. They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge. So here is how I think this will go: - somebody (MSTF or some startup) will make a good chatGTP/AI search. The search will be good and will address issues you pointed. - they will not make money but they will disrupt Google Search causing crisis in Google. Google will shrink and become irrelevant. - eventually that somebody from step 1 will want to make money and AI search will become crap again - and cycle will start again

itsoktocry 4y ago
>They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge How does a deteriorating product that people are complaining about lead to "great quarterly numbers"? Google does not benefit, in any sense beyond the immediate short-term, by providing lousy search results to customers. I think part of the problem is that the average person is unable to distinguish good from crap, and the bar for "quality" content is really low.
konha 4y ago
> The problem with google search is they do not want to eliminate spam. They really cannot do that since they need to show great quarterly numbers otherwise stock will plunge. Why would shareholders value high amounts of spam in the search index?

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

We'll break off into small communities and share information that way. It's how we did it with BBSs, IRC, etc... Maybe, just maybe, the world will slow down a bit, then.

lmarcos 4y ago

Well, we could "just" avoid Google and Bing. Sure, other search engines may not be as powerful as the big ones, but it's up to us to make them more popular (they get more revenue, so they can improve their engine... We just need to pray so that they don't become Google/Bing. If they do, though, rinse and repeat)

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dalbasal 4y ago

This was there from the very beginning. In fact, one of Google's advantages of altavista and such was that pagerank diluted the effects of keyword stuffing, the primitive SEO that had degraded primitive websearch. Search, media and advertising is dynamic, cat and mouse stuff... always. I wouldn't be surprised if "Language Model Optimization (TM)" is currently being invented by a drop shipper living under his basement. Measure something, act on it, and you change the thing. You have to remember that these things have symmetry. The seo is trying to help users get to his site. From their perspective, Google's anti-spam is hostile to that goal. Google is trying to serve search results. To them, SEO is a hostile attempt to prevent that.