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Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling fo

Exactly. Search ads are pretty much the perfect internet business model - if my biz is having a sale on lawnmowers, who better to target than people googling for "buy lawnmower"? If this is done right, everyone walks away happy and google makes a killing. ChatGPT is great, but it's pretty far from providing good answers to "where can I get a good deal on a lawnmower right now?" They might take over a decent share of esoteric, "school assignment" type queries, but they're not really a threat for the high-value searches.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?
- karpierz 4y ago
  You're saying if ChatGPT had a regularly updated search index, and was capable of effectively ranking webpages to duck around SEO (adversarial webpages looking to hack the rankings), it'd be competitive with Google? Can you explain how this is any different than what Google does?
  - sdrinf 4y ago
    Not GP, but, and this is a hypothesis, it seems to me the realtime scrape might be enough. GPT seems incredibly intelligent in figuring out the ranking(!), importance(!) constraint-search(!) and personalization(!) by itself. Meaning, if OpenAI can do realtime fine-tuning of the web on a daily basis, they _might_ have sidestepped ~25 years of R&D from Google, and be an order-of-mag better.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      When I google, I have an internal dialogue about whether the results are shit to begin with, if they aren't, maybe the thing I'm looking for is more niche, so it's not in the top ten results. ChatGPT could for example just maybe try 5 google searches in the background, just glean data from the description, title, question asked, date, etc, and maybe use some of it's own scraping on the top 10 results to reorder them and give better summaries. E.g. imagine when you search via chatgpt. It googles : search phrase, search phrase + reddit, search phrase variation 1, variation 1 + reddit, var 2, etc... all in parallel almost then uses that to mini-tune an ai model to find the stuff that best matches what you're really wanting to find, and then scrapes top ten for results.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  I don't understand how this is different from what Google currently provides, except that it skips one step (navigating to wire cutter, selecting some text and right clicking, then "search web for [product name]"). The only difference, which is not an improvement, is that you've suddenly given Wirecutter total power. At least if you make users visit the site and read a bit of the review, the reviewer has the hurdle of writing some text that can convince a human reader that the results are not totally bought and paid for.
  - svantana 4y ago
    Right! I think most people are uncomfortable with totally outsourcing their decisions, however smart the service is. I want to do my own research, and feel like I've gotten a good overview of the market before I commit.
elcomet 4y ago
Ads work because they're embedded in interesting or useful things. No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Chat-GPT can be used for this: returing interesting results. The ads don't have to be served through chat-GPT, but could be given as a side result.
- isx726552 4y ago
  > No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Isn’t that pretty much what the Yellow Pages used to be? As long as you know what you’re getting…
  - eduction 4y ago
    Yellow pages were not 100% ads. They were where you got phone numbers and addresses for businesses, which was important pre internet. They did have tons of ads alongside the listings, but the unpaid listings were core to the offering. If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages, and to the regular listings specifically (not ads, although they’d certainly be there trying to entice you elsewhere). (You could also get the numbers via 411 but this cost money, 50 cents or a dollar IIRC).
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      > If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages If you wanted to find the number of a particular restaurant, the white pages were far more efficient. The yellow pages were primarily useful when you wanted a list of restaurants, not a specific one. Something else that was nearly 100% ads: the old Computer Shopper magazine. As I recall, they printed just enough editorial material to qualify for the "literature" postal rate rather than the "advertising" rate.
      - eduction 4y ago
        My memory is that originally business listings were excluded from the white pages, added in later years. Been a while though!
literallycancer 4y ago
You are describing a comparison shopping search/aggregator. If you are having a sale, you are going to be near the top of the results for any reasonable sorting scheme. (An actual sale, not here's 50% off of my bullshit price) And searching Google for "buy lawnmower" is a good way to buy something you didn't want or need. Even if you actually needed a lawnmower. The only people it helps are those who don't care whether the item is good, and don't care about the price at which point they might as well just walk into the nearest store and buy the first one they see.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

If ChatGPT had up to the minute crawl results and my Geo location, that'd be enough. "Help me buy whichever budget electric range Wirecutter recommends at the moment". > Okay, here's the store near your home that is selling the Frigidaire electric range that Wirecutter is currently recommending, at the best price. > Would you like to buy it online at roughly the same price or get the address of the store?

karpierz 4y ago
You're saying if ChatGPT had a regularly updated search index, and was capable of effectively ranking webpages to duck around SEO (adversarial webpages looking to hack the rankings), it'd be competitive with Google? Can you explain how this is any different than what Google does?
- sdrinf 4y ago
  Not GP, but, and this is a hypothesis, it seems to me the realtime scrape might be enough. GPT seems incredibly intelligent in figuring out the ranking(!), importance(!) constraint-search(!) and personalization(!) by itself. Meaning, if OpenAI can do realtime fine-tuning of the web on a daily basis, they _might_ have sidestepped ~25 years of R&D from Google, and be an order-of-mag better.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    When I google, I have an internal dialogue about whether the results are shit to begin with, if they aren't, maybe the thing I'm looking for is more niche, so it's not in the top ten results. ChatGPT could for example just maybe try 5 google searches in the background, just glean data from the description, title, question asked, date, etc, and maybe use some of it's own scraping on the top 10 results to reorder them and give better summaries. E.g. imagine when you search via chatgpt. It googles : search phrase, search phrase + reddit, search phrase variation 1, variation 1 + reddit, var 2, etc... all in parallel almost then uses that to mini-tune an ai model to find the stuff that best matches what you're really wanting to find, and then scrapes top ten for results.
bagacrap 4y ago
I don't understand how this is different from what Google currently provides, except that it skips one step (navigating to wire cutter, selecting some text and right clicking, then "search web for [product name]"). The only difference, which is not an improvement, is that you've suddenly given Wirecutter total power. At least if you make users visit the site and read a bit of the review, the reviewer has the hurdle of writing some text that can convince a human reader that the results are not totally bought and paid for.
- svantana 4y ago
  Right! I think most people are uncomfortable with totally outsourcing their decisions, however smart the service is. I want to do my own research, and feel like I've gotten a good overview of the market before I commit.

elcomet 4y ago

Ads work because they're embedded in interesting or useful things. No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Chat-GPT can be used for this: returing interesting results. The ads don't have to be served through chat-GPT, but could be given as a side result.

isx726552 4y ago
> No one would use a search engine composed of 100% ads. Isn’t that pretty much what the Yellow Pages used to be? As long as you know what you’re getting…
- eduction 4y ago
  Yellow pages were not 100% ads. They were where you got phone numbers and addresses for businesses, which was important pre internet. They did have tons of ads alongside the listings, but the unpaid listings were core to the offering. If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages, and to the regular listings specifically (not ads, although they’d certainly be there trying to entice you elsewhere). (You could also get the numbers via 411 but this cost money, 50 cents or a dollar IIRC).
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    > If you wanted to call for a reservation at a particular restaurant, check movie showtimes at a particular theater, you would go to the yellow pages If you wanted to find the number of a particular restaurant, the white pages were far more efficient. The yellow pages were primarily useful when you wanted a list of restaurants, not a specific one. Something else that was nearly 100% ads: the old Computer Shopper magazine. As I recall, they printed just enough editorial material to qualify for the "literature" postal rate rather than the "advertising" rate.
    - eduction 4y ago
      My memory is that originally business listings were excluded from the white pages, added in later years. Been a while though!

literallycancer 4y ago

You are describing a comparison shopping search/aggregator. If you are having a sale, you are going to be near the top of the results for any reasonable sorting scheme. (An actual sale, not here's 50% off of my bullshit price) And searching Google for "buy lawnmower" is a good way to buy something you didn't want or need. Even if you actually needed a lawnmower. The only people it helps are those who don't care whether the item is good, and don't care about the price at which point they might as well just walk into the nearest store and buy the first one they see.