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I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. For 90% of my searches I don't want any search

I don't know that end-users really care about having a GPT-written paragraph accompanying their search results. For 90% of my searches I don't want any search results. I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. In the olden days of the web I had to figure out what to search to give me a website that would give me that answer as the first result, and in the mid-90s that was really hard because search was bad. In the late 90s when Google launched it got much easier, especially for things where there was a network of websites about a thing that all pointed to a canonical authority. PageRank found that authority source. Life was good. Over the next 20 years the war between Google and SEO spammers meant finding things got a bit harder. Along with that Google's proliferation of adverts on their search result pages meant it actually became harder to even find the website link I wanted in the page itself. Fortunately Google also started putting knowledge graph things in the results and the sidebar which made life less painful. I think we're due another shake-up, and Bing-GPT might be it. If they show me a simple paragraph of readable text that explains the answer to what I've searched for then that would improve most of my searches. It'd be like Google's knowledge graph box but for everything.

notinfuriated 4y ago
> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. As others have pointed out, AI is not yet capable of this. I do agree though, I want this too. But I don't trust OpenAI or Google or anyone else to do it correctly yet.
Animats 4y ago
> For 90% of my searches I don't want any search results. I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. Which, of course, is what Bing just announced. Whether it will be the right answer remains to be seen. Notice that there's a price increase, of sorts, for this at Bing. To get on the "waiting list" you have to sign up with Bing and agree to receive marketing information. Will public access to large language model search come with a decrease in privacy? It did for Siri and Alexa, which learn about you and cannot be used anonymously.
rchaud 4y ago
> Over the next 20 years the war between Google and SEO spammers meant finding things got a bit harder. Along with that Google's proliferation of adverts on their search result pages meant it actually became harder to even find the website link I wanted in the page itself. Yes, SEO spam has largely made the search experience a lot worse and ripe for change. But ChatGPT crawls these terrible links too! Many of the links Google spits out are themselves summarizing information found elsewhere, like a book or academic paper. So why would you trust GPT to provide an authoritative answer more than your own instincts? It's omniscience is a function of everything it's crawled; that doesn't mean it has any idea of how to weave them together into a coherent response.
- visarga 4y ago
  I don't think spam is an unsolvable problem. I think Google didn't want to solve it. I could find whole networks of spam sites in minutes, they could too. But the web is larger than what can be fixed manually. They should make an AI bot to search through the search box and decide if the results are crap, and train it with human preferences. Or set the bot to find difficult to find answers and see how many it finds and how high they are ranked. Probably working in search at Google was a dead end career, the search department wasn't sexy anymore and didn't have green field projects. Maybe they were just afraid to change anything as long as it makes money for them. So the good people left and they have been coasting for a decade.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    To believe spam is solvable you must also believe capitalism is solvable. Spam will always be working on the next one up of the system there is too much money involved. Also by needing an always increasing amount of money to make the market happy Google will gladly become part of the problem.
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  >So why would you trust GPT to provide an authoritative answer more than your own instincts To use a highly specific example, I've recently been doing a lot of work in Excel and the search space for Excel related queries has been almost completely destroyed by SEO adware sites. If you're lucky, the answer you're looking for is at least buried somewhere on the page you click on, but there's just as much a chance you'll get a semi-gibberish pseudo-article that itself is probably AI generated. Using my instincts/intuition to locate the correct answer is a non-zero cost of time and effort, made intentionally more challenging by site owners who want me to linger and consume advertisements. On the other hand, asking ChatGPT how to match two columns with XLookup or what have you almost always returns a correct, concise answer on the first try. If it's not correct, the formula doesn't work, and I can tell ChatGPT it gave me the wrong formula, and it corrects itself. Even in the rare event that happens, it's a fraction as much effort and frustration as it takes to rummage through the top search results for the same query.
croes 4y ago
If ChatGPT gives all the answers, the website owner will block access. They are already angry about Google doing something similar and ChatGPT is worse to them
qwytw 4y ago
> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question You mean 90% (or X%) definitive answer with no good way to verify it due to zero context (unlike in normal websites)?
sumeno 4y ago
> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. If you just want an answer that sounds definitive and authoritative then these chat bots are great. If you want it to be accurate as well... that's a different story.
- pixl97 4y ago
  You can get a definitive, authoritative answer if you ask the question correctly, but years of search engines show that people are really, really, really bad at asking questions well. If genies existed there'd be a lot of 10 inch pianists and dead people buried under piles of money.
gwright 4y ago
> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question In the real world we don't have any agreed upon general notion of "definitive, authoritative" sources. A certain amount of skepticism is important to avoid all sorts of abuses of authority and "appeal to authority" is a recognized logical fallacy. Be careful what you wish for. I'm pretty sure I don't want to live in a world where everyone behaves as if the response from a ML system is "definitive [and] authoritative".
- penjelly 4y ago
  if chatgpt cited its sources and gave you the links, wouldnt that change things? You can always dive deeper.
  - gwright 4y ago
    That certainly would be helpful.
penjelly 4y ago
echo this. traditional search will take backseat, most people seek "answers" when they search, not sources which they can derive "answers" from. This will enable the power search for less tech savvy folks, while improving the feedback loop for experienced searchers. Feels like search has changed forever. browsers are left with challenges, particularly legitimacy of results, and ensuring a viable ad model. No doubt we'll see those soon.

notinfuriated 4y ago

> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. As others have pointed out, AI is not yet capable of this. I do agree though, I want this too. But I don't trust OpenAI or Google or anyone else to do it correctly yet.

Animats 4y ago

> For 90% of my searches I don't want any search results. I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. Which, of course, is what Bing just announced. Whether it will be the right answer remains to be seen. Notice that there's a price increase, of sorts, for this at Bing. To get on the "waiting list" you have to sign up with Bing and agree to receive marketing information. Will public access to large language model search come with a decrease in privacy? It did for Siri and Alexa, which learn about you and cannot be used anonymously.

rchaud 4y ago

> Over the next 20 years the war between Google and SEO spammers meant finding things got a bit harder. Along with that Google's proliferation of adverts on their search result pages meant it actually became harder to even find the website link I wanted in the page itself. Yes, SEO spam has largely made the search experience a lot worse and ripe for change. But ChatGPT crawls these terrible links too! Many of the links Google spits out are themselves summarizing information found elsewhere, like a book or academic paper. So why would you trust GPT to provide an authoritative answer more than your own instincts? It's omniscience is a function of everything it's crawled; that doesn't mean it has any idea of how to weave them together into a coherent response.

visarga 4y ago
I don't think spam is an unsolvable problem. I think Google didn't want to solve it. I could find whole networks of spam sites in minutes, they could too. But the web is larger than what can be fixed manually. They should make an AI bot to search through the search box and decide if the results are crap, and train it with human preferences. Or set the bot to find difficult to find answers and see how many it finds and how high they are ranked. Probably working in search at Google was a dead end career, the search department wasn't sexy anymore and didn't have green field projects. Maybe they were just afraid to change anything as long as it makes money for them. So the good people left and they have been coasting for a decade.
- pixl97 4y ago
  To believe spam is solvable you must also believe capitalism is solvable. Spam will always be working on the next one up of the system there is too much money involved. Also by needing an always increasing amount of money to make the market happy Google will gladly become part of the problem.
mustacheemperor 4y ago
>So why would you trust GPT to provide an authoritative answer more than your own instincts To use a highly specific example, I've recently been doing a lot of work in Excel and the search space for Excel related queries has been almost completely destroyed by SEO adware sites. If you're lucky, the answer you're looking for is at least buried somewhere on the page you click on, but there's just as much a chance you'll get a semi-gibberish pseudo-article that itself is probably AI generated. Using my instincts/intuition to locate the correct answer is a non-zero cost of time and effort, made intentionally more challenging by site owners who want me to linger and consume advertisements. On the other hand, asking ChatGPT how to match two columns with XLookup or what have you almost always returns a correct, concise answer on the first try. If it's not correct, the formula doesn't work, and I can tell ChatGPT it gave me the wrong formula, and it corrects itself. Even in the rare event that happens, it's a fraction as much effort and frustration as it takes to rummage through the top search results for the same query.

croes 4y ago

If ChatGPT gives all the answers, the website owner will block access. They are already angry about Google doing something similar and ChatGPT is worse to them

qwytw 4y ago

> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question You mean 90% (or X%) definitive answer with no good way to verify it due to zero context (unlike in normal websites)?

sumeno 4y ago

> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question. If you just want an answer that sounds definitive and authoritative then these chat bots are great. If you want it to be accurate as well... that's a different story.

pixl97 4y ago
You can get a definitive, authoritative answer if you ask the question correctly, but years of search engines show that people are really, really, really bad at asking questions well. If genies existed there'd be a lot of 10 inch pianists and dead people buried under piles of money.

gwright 4y ago

> I want a definitive, authoritative answer to a question In the real world we don't have any agreed upon general notion of "definitive, authoritative" sources. A certain amount of skepticism is important to avoid all sorts of abuses of authority and "appeal to authority" is a recognized logical fallacy. Be careful what you wish for. I'm pretty sure I don't want to live in a world where everyone behaves as if the response from a ML system is "definitive [and] authoritative".

penjelly 4y ago
if chatgpt cited its sources and gave you the links, wouldnt that change things? You can always dive deeper.
- gwright 4y ago
  That certainly would be helpful.

penjelly 4y ago

echo this. traditional search will take backseat, most people seek "answers" when they search, not sources which they can derive "answers" from. This will enable the power search for less tech savvy folks, while improving the feedback loop for experienced searchers. Feels like search has changed forever. browsers are left with challenges, particularly legitimacy of results, and ensuring a viable ad model. No doubt we'll see those soon.