3 ms·

This development of search engines becoming answer finding machines doesn't sit well with me. It seems that they are confounding two use cases: 1) I want to fi

This development of search engines becoming answer finding machines doesn't sit well with me. It seems that they are confounding two use cases: 1) I want to find a certain website 2) I want to find an answer to this question I have These often overlap, but not always. Google used to be great at 1), then progressively started to solve 2). LLMs are better at 2), but are useless at 1). It's like Google wanted to become a search engine for people who don't even know what a website is and just go to Google for 2). I think the products "search engine" and "chat bot" should stay separate. However, I'd like to see LLMs merged with WolframAlpha.

ilyt 4y ago
and 3) Filter out SEO spam and other crap out of the two. Which is slowly becoming worse, and I'd imagine that would only accelerate now that would-be SEO spammer could just feed ChatGPT like and get a prompt for reasonable (for search engine bot) article
molasses 4y ago
Using google to find specific websites, only amounts to me typing hacker news or facebook. That's about it. My main bulk of queries are question based, but I'm also from a previous era, where I throw keywords at Google rather than questions, which is a learned response from back then. I do 'ask' google assistant questions, and it doesn't do a bad job at it. I would love it to be a glorified PA and general knowledgeable 'person' I can go to for advice. At the same time, I've containered much of my interaction with Google so it can't draw on my past history. So I have no idea what I'm missing. It did have a tendency to feedback loop a bit too much for me in the past, pigeon holing me to specific websites. There's a huge trust issue, you leak your ID in about four common regular queries so I'm not so sure I can even beat it.
bbor 4y ago
Imagine teaching an LLM to guess whether the user wants 1 or 2, and in the case of links it can curate the best ones based on their exhaustive logs of your browsing history and demographics. A beautiful, technically stunning, only slightly dystopian future The core point here is that search isn’t going away, LLMs are just being added on top. They’re not gonna just turn off their page ranking algos, cause LLMs are worse than useless without cited sources

ilyt 4y ago

and 3) Filter out SEO spam and other crap out of the two. Which is slowly becoming worse, and I'd imagine that would only accelerate now that would-be SEO spammer could just feed ChatGPT like and get a prompt for reasonable (for search engine bot) article

molasses 4y ago

Using google to find specific websites, only amounts to me typing hacker news or facebook. That's about it. My main bulk of queries are question based, but I'm also from a previous era, where I throw keywords at Google rather than questions, which is a learned response from back then. I do 'ask' google assistant questions, and it doesn't do a bad job at it. I would love it to be a glorified PA and general knowledgeable 'person' I can go to for advice. At the same time, I've containered much of my interaction with Google so it can't draw on my past history. So I have no idea what I'm missing. It did have a tendency to feedback loop a bit too much for me in the past, pigeon holing me to specific websites. There's a huge trust issue, you leak your ID in about four common regular queries so I'm not so sure I can even beat it.

bbor 4y ago

Imagine teaching an LLM to guess whether the user wants 1 or 2, and in the case of links it can curate the best ones based on their exhaustive logs of your browsing history and demographics. A beautiful, technically stunning, only slightly dystopian future The core point here is that search isn’t going away, LLMs are just being added on top. They’re not gonna just turn off their page ranking algos, cause LLMs are worse than useless without cited sources