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The Seo spam has already made it hard to find what you want on google. Seo spam + ai is going to be a dumpster fire. Whoever solves this problem will probably g

The Seo spam has already made it hard to find what you want on google. Seo spam + ai is going to be a dumpster fire. Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google Can’t wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next 5 years

nico 4y ago
Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. The ChatGPT user-experience is mind-blowing, but when you start using their API and see, partly, how the sausage is made, you realize that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion. But that’s exactly where the magic of the experience is, and what gives ChatGPT it’s edge. Google should just launch a “chatux” version of their search.
- napier 4y ago
  Have you tried Bingchat yet? It’s rumoured to be using a more advanced model from OAI than ChatGPT or Davinci and is very often surprisingly excellent.
  - nico 4y ago
    Keep reading great things about it. Will have to try it. Thank you for the recommendation!
  - wetpaws 4y ago
    It is so low heavily lobotomized that 99% I find much better results with chatgpt even though it is technically an older model.
    - nirav72 4y ago
      I've noticed the same thing. Other than generating code examples - I found it be useless for search. I've had better luck using a third-party extension that inserts web search context into the ChatGPT than using Bing chat to search for something.
      - nico 4y ago
        Could you mention or link the extension here? Thank you!
        nirav72 4y ago
        Sure. The one I'm using is WebChatGPT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webchatgpt-chatgpt-with-i/lpfemeioodjbpieminkklglpmhlngfcn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webchatgpt-chatgpt... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-chatgpt/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-chatgpt/?... note - I haven't tried the firefox version. But the chrome one works fine in Brave. Edit: Source for the above extension: https://github.com/qunash/chatgpt-advanced https://github.com/qunash/chatgpt-advanced
  - beauzero 4y ago
    I was pretty decent early on. Now I just use it to augment copilot...generally when I don't have a specific "start" but just an idea...works better than dumping a comment into copilot. I was hoping with the 3 tabs creative -> more exact it would be a little better but I haven't seen any difference. It isn't quite as interesting as when it was regularly hallucinating. I found the hallucinations to bubble up inspiration...forgotten facts, unused paths, etc.
- jsenn 4y ago
  > that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion Could you expand on this? The context awareness is the part that blows my mind. I would be disappointed/fascinated to find out that it’s “just” a simple set of tricks!
  - nico 4y ago
    ChatGPT is “only” a chat interface to GPT. GPT basically has access to two contexts: its internals, and the prompt that it gets Then when you ask something to ChatGPT, it takes your prompt and it generates a new prompt that includes the previous messages in your session, so that GPT can use them as context. But, there’s a limit to the size of the prompt. And it’s not that big. So then ChatGPT’s magic is figuring out how to crafts prompts, within the size limits, to feed GPT, so that it has enough context to give a good answer. Essentially, ChatGPT is some really amazing prompt-engineering system with a great interface.
    - jsenn 4y ago
      That makes sense. So ChatGPT has to use some cleverness to present the relevant previous text in the current prompt, but the language model is still responsible for pulling out the meaning of that context and responding appropriately. I remain mind-blown :)
      - nico 4y ago
        Exactly. Very eloquently put.
- passion__desire 4y ago
  [0] : "You can try doing a web search with the URL, but Frankly, I haven't had much success with that." In my experience, Bing is the best search engine for finding info on deleted videos – for example: bing.com/search?q=youtu.be/t1wjL4BqXlI 1st result shows title of video: "Awolnation "Sail" – Unlimited Gravity Remix" [1] Daniel Dennett talking about why we should still support explicit string search. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/3876476/how-to-find-video-info-for-now-deleted-videos?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/3876476/how-to-fin... [1] https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1330 https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1330
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. Wasn't ChatGPT3 trained on web content with a cutoff of 2021? Future ChatGPT versions will likely be trained on data tainted by AI-generated fluff, and will face the same challenges Google is facing with today's web content.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    Yeah someone needs to figure out how to get a continuously trained online model up and running without running the risk of people figuring out how to exploit it
  - jmbwell 4y ago
    And when this serpent starts eating its tail and the AI starts returning highly-ranked results consisting of AI-generated content, … well, I hope I can move to a farm by then.
    - nico 4y ago
      It’s been like that since humans have been around. That’s the way knowledge spreads. We humans have been repeating and imitating ourselves forever. That’s even the way babies learn to talk. And we are not all clones, we don’t all think, say or do exactly the same things. But most just repeat and consume the same content and ideas (movies, music, books, languages, media).
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - mfcl 4y ago
        (Why are you being downvoted?) I think the important part is to have a minimum of filtering. Humans consume knowledge brought by others humans, but most of the time we cherry pick the true and useful knowledge and reject what turns out to be false (ideally). I think what AI brings to the table is automation and speed, but the quality is not better. So if AI starts consuming its own content, will that decrease the quality of knowledge* in general? (*Here I mean the first knowledge you quickly get from a search or asking some AI, not what you could get after hours/days of research.)
- bagacrap 4y ago
  Why were you using a web search if you didn't want to access the web (find a website)? Openai says don't use chatgpt for search. Microsoft says double check everything Sydney tells you. Is there an argument for LLMs replacing search besides laziness?
  - imachine1980_ 4y ago
    If this works as we wish(no saying that is posible), this will reduce the amount of seo spam trash you read to 0%, will allow to investigate things faster, and will allow to have more recursive way to expore topics. And this will be key to make ok google more similar at what we wish as ai companion
  - simonster 4y ago
    It seems inevitable that LLMs will eventually work for search. They just don't work yet.
    - amrocha 4y ago
      It really does not seem inevitable at all if you know how the tech works under the hood. The trust problem can't be solved with the current approach.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      So will the LLMs be able to stay current with 24 hour news and updates? And will users be able to get a link to any sources if they ask so they can verify or go the website as desired? Will those websites still have a reason to exist if they're just being used to feed the search LLMs?
      - bagacrap 4y ago
        All difficult questions that will need to be answered in the affirmative if the web is going to survive. The only well-funded player that is really incentivized to make all these things happen is Google, as literally every other megacorp wants you to be stuck in their walled gardens instead of searching the web.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Does ChatGPT know things like part numbers for mid-80s ICs by Japanese manufacturers? That's what I use search for. Unfortunately Google is getting worse at those queries, but I doubt AI is going to be better. Beware of wanting "answers" or "solutions" --- that's a slippery slope towards complacency and loss of agency, replaced by corporate subservience. Classic example: instead of finding a service manual or discussions on repairing something, AI may try to convince you to buy a new one.
  - gmadsen 4y ago
    that seems like exactly something bing could give you
  - ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
    ChatGPT does surprisingly well at this task. My question was very biased towards it knowing the answer because I asked it for examples of mid-80s Japanese ICs when google failed me, but it definitely knows a ton of model numbers for real parts from the era. Give it a shot with a real-world example and report back
    - amrocha 4y ago
      The point is that you can't trust it because language models are bullshitters. What's the point of a search you have to verify through another search afterwards.
      - masfuerte 4y ago
        As long as it's not wrong too often, a black box that coughs up answers which are hard to find but easy to verify is very useful.
        nico 4y ago
        Great way to put it!
        amrocha 4y ago
- nirav72 4y ago
  >while using ChatGPT more and more. I'm assuming you're using ChatGPT to validate/generate technical solutions such as code and not necessarily searching for specific information? If its for information search, then how do you deal with the fact that at times it tends to make up a things that are factually incorrect or logically inconsistent?
  - ruszki 4y ago
    By using Google to verify. It’s still okayish to find out whether a statement is true or not. The problem is that Google is becoming worse to find that statement. For example, I wanted to figure out how I should replace a given dependency. Google was terrible, so was Stackoverflow. ChatGPT gave me a guess. For such questions it’s quite right in about 3/4th of the queries, and when I search for the given guess Google finds it immediately whether it’s fine or not.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      And what happens if something like ChatGPT replaces Google entirely?
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        Current plans for language-model-driven search is to have the answers driven by a normal search index. So the LLM can run ask to run a web search and the result gets copypasted back into its input prompt. Basically, it's Googling for you and summarizing the result. Which makes me wonder how long until websites figure out how to convince the index to do prompt injections that wouldn't fool an actual human looking at results on a search engine results page.
      - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
        There are other search engines, such as Marginalia. The bigger question is what happens if websites start disappearing, this is a bigger problem than you might think because even websites like Wikipedia, reference news websites, which are visitor- and therefore ad-driven.
- Groxx 4y ago
  It'll probably look something like this.
- krupan 4y ago
  Is this actually giving you good results? The few times I tried to use chatGPT instead of google I got terrible results: - Horrible and wrong driving directions - Buggy incomplete code - long winded explanations of how it was just a chat AI and not a whatever whatever blah blah blah I found it to be tedious and incredibly untrustworthy
  - sethjgore 4y ago
    You have to be specific. It is surprisingly good when I asked it to respond like a software engineer expert then gave a very specific problem it spits out no issue
- subsection1h 4y ago
  > Most of the times I want an answer or a solution Are you not interested in ensuring that the answer or solution is based on the most authoritative information that exists, the source material on which all regurgitations are based? Do you generally not read technical specifications or research papers, and instead prefer the kind of content that is accompanied by a green check mark?
  - carbonguy 4y ago
    > Are you not interested in ensuring that the answer or solution is based on the most authoritative information that exists, the source material on which all regurgitations are based? Not OP, but I'll answer: No, I am almost never interested in finding the most authoritative source for anything, because the effort vs. reward of those searches is not favorable and the cost of being incorrect on any given point is pretty dang low. EDIT: However, with respect to the idea of using ChatGPT for answering general knowledge questions - there's enough demonstrations of it providing fabricated information that I've adopted the low-cost heuristic of not trusting ChatGPT for anything and preferring to seek information elsewhere. I guess this means I seek moderately-authoritative sources (say, Wikipedia) as a general rule.
  - clnq 4y ago
    > prefer the kind of content that is accompanied by a green check mark? For most searches, yes.
- piokoch 4y ago
  I was already there... I abandoned Altavista since Google was so much better. Until Google became spammed too and no longer seems to be much better than Altavista.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  > Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. > It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. It seems P. T. Barnum was correct, There's a sucker born every minute. When I'm searching, I don't want an answer. I'm looking for the truth, which is probably buried somewhere. At this point, my biggest fear with "AI" is ChatGPT-powered Customer Service agents.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Yesterday, instead of trying to search for information on the interaction between the tangential velocity of an O'Neill cylinder and internal air speed and how it'd be affected by various other factors, I asked ChatGPT, and was able to keep probing it with questions and have it explain pieces I didn't get first time around. It gave me the formulas to solve various problems I stated, showed how to use them, have me relevant keywords to dig into further. It was so much better than searching and hoping to find something close enough to be able to figure out the missing bits myself. I have found plenty of things where ChatGPT falls totally apart, and I still had to try some things a couple of times because my initial wording caused it to veer off in the wrong direction, but when it works it's truly amazing... Where it truly shines is where there's nothing in Google that answers exactly what I want, but plenty of explanations of how to solve different aspects of the problem which ChatGPT can assemble and plug things into...
  - nico 4y ago
    Exactly! One of my best experiences has been asking ChatGPT to explain physical models, give me equations, change some parameters, evaluate/solve the equations or give me code to run and solve the model, iterating with it along the way. It is definitely not perfect, but in those iterative cases when trying to learn something new, in a field that you are familiar with (so you can tell or at least can quickly check, if it’s wrong or right).
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  > Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. its just wrong so often and I just end up having to verify everything on google anyway.
mjevans 4y ago
Back of napkin approach: Allow-list some sites that already have a good reputation for useful results (probably anything scraped for summary snips). Penalize all other sites based on the quantity of ads and similar non-content. Use the old web search core on what's left.
- ssklash 4y ago
  Kagi lets you do exactly this. You can allow/block list certain site results, or create a curated list of domains to include results from.
lunfard000 4y ago
Websites are seo-ing Reddit now (shit things like: Top ten airfryer recommended by Reddit), so appending reddit is not enough anymore. In a very close future we are going to have to type the whole site:reddit.com.
- whatevaa 4y ago
  Well, I already do that today. Probably won't help too much, though, cause AI will generate some legit looking posts/comments and you will have a hard time figuring out if they are written by a bot or person.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    Exactly. I keep coming back to the fact that, between all the different ways AI can generate content, the entire user-contributed-internet is about to be completely flooded with amicable and true-sounding nonsense with a peppering of whatever viewpoint the bot-runner wants to push. I honestly don't see any way out besides Digital ID -- if a person has to provide the host with information about who they really are, then once they're discovered the host can actually prevent further abuse. Otherwise, a single person can create infinite bots to shill whatever product or viewpoint they want. Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital ID. The same actors who use the internet to push misinformation benefit from anonymity.
    - pictureofabear 4y ago
      It's almost like the Matrix but in cyberspace where humans are constantly trying to escape the bots, except instead of mining the humans for energy, the bots are mining data.
    - antifa 4y ago
      > the entire user-contributed-internet is about to be completely flooded with amicable and true-sounding nonsense with a peppering of whatever viewpoint the bot-runner wants to push. Feels like that's already happened before ChatGPT.
  - 4y ago
izzydata 4y ago
My solution is to go back to meat space and physical libraries of information.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's seriously hard to beat libraries. For a while, it looked like the internet was making them less instrumental, but I think the balance started tipping back toward them a few years back.
  - charlieyu1 4y ago
    My local library doesn't even have tech books.
    - wl 4y ago
      Interlibrary loans.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Oh, so much this. It's a library superpower that shockingly few people are aware of. At any US public library, you can borrow books from every other public library in the nation -- even including the Library of Congress.
avereveard 4y ago
> Can’t wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next 5 years I think new form of comment ranking will take over, all those system we're building to detect ai spam will also double as scoring system to evaluate content originality. the problem will be to differentiate good original content and bad original content, but that can be left to flagging systems.
coldtea 4y ago
>Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google If it's solvable. There are many problems that aren't. Perhaps the new Google would just be a 1996-era Yahoo! human-curated catalog.
- philote 4y ago
  I've often wanted something like that yahoo catalog. I miss the days of being able to browse categories of sites.
  - tremon 4y ago
    My hope is for something like YaCy with a web-of-trust overlay. I'd want it to only show results from peers that I trust, and if garbage starts showing up in my search results, I want to know from which peer it came so I can un-trust it. Which in my mind is somewhat of a middle ground between a search engine and a directory: what I'd want is a whitelist of curated directories that contain domains to be crawled by my search engine.
    - strix_varius 4y ago
      Ditto. I would like a fuzzy web of trust: I specify connections that I trust explicitly, and it provides results from that network out N steps. Each hop reduces the confidence value. And yeah, cited sources so I can un-trust sources of junk.
  - Minor49er 4y ago
    You'll probably enjoy Curlie (created by the former DMOZ maintainers) and Neocities (try out different tags for better results) https://curlie.org/en https://curlie.org/en https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=last_updated https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=last_updated
- nosduhz 4y ago
  I sure hope so. It's part of the approach we're taking for e-commerce search with https://shopdeft.com https://shopdeft.com
guluarte 4y ago
sadly closed gardens like reddit, human moderation is the way to go
stockhorn 4y ago
How about letting the users flag each website with a label "seo spam", "useful", " fakenews", "inaccurate"... and display a summary of the votes as a badge beneath each link in the search results? We could create a browser extension to add this functionality to all search engines at once. Using a web of trust mechanism to ensure that we only get real votes... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285
- pushfoo 4y ago
  Spammers would submit fake tags faster than everyday users. Since this is a social problem rather than a technical one, maybe old-school trust networks are worth considering instead.
  - bnjms 4y ago
    I assume implicitly that votes only count for users two degrees of separation from you and it’s tied to real life friends registry. Wish FB hasn’t happened and the web of trust stuff turned into something useful.
    - pushfoo 4y ago
      I don't think real life is the main issue. Instead, it seems like the same issue PGP has: the benefits never outweighed the bad UX for most people.
      - colinsane 4y ago
        you probably don’t even need explicit voting. Google already tries to figure out which results a person found useful just based on existing UI interactions, and use that in the rankings. if they operated a significant social media arm, they could link these two datasets to basically the same effect we’re all speaking of here. heck they maybe already do this in a different/more hierarchical form based on a person’s Youtube graph.
        4y ago
wilsonnb3 4y ago
We're already drowning in an ocean of SEO bullshit without help from AI. Adding another ocean isn't really going to change anything IMO.
- hedora 4y ago
  Within the next 12 months, I think AI is going to produce a million times more SEO bullshit than humans can.
- clnq 4y ago
  Maybe it’s time for the pile of trash to topple. We could go back to the mindset of using specific sites for information and the internet more like a tool than a source of casual content for scrolling and browsing. Or so one can dream.
Gigachad 4y ago
We already have smartasses copy pasting chatgpt responses in to comments here. It's easy to tell at this point because chatgpt always gives overly verbose and polite, positive comments. Which is completely out of character for a HN user.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Once someone creates SmarmyNerdGPT, it's all over for HN.
  - _AzMoo 4y ago
    Ask ChatGPT for a comment, then tell it to "do it again but make it snarky".
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    SmarmyNerdGPT is a pointless product. You could have done this with bash scripts and curl. Why would anyone pay for this?
    - Yiin 4y ago
      no one said anything about that being a product
      - voakbasda 4y ago
        Exactly. Far too many people just want to watch the world burn.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      Why write in bash when you can write in rust
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        we all know that the lambda calculus is the only true way to produce software or to think about ruining the world, really at scale. If you're not using functional programming to ruin the world what are you doing really.
rchaud 4y ago
I have a sinking feeling that the 'solution' will be to use a "good AI" to combat the bad AI churning out ad ridden clickbait listicles in perpetuity.
worldofmatthew 4y ago
I suspect that old fashioned website directories and webrings will come more into popularity.
kaoD 4y ago
> Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google I bet it's something as easy as "derank pages with ads". Now you just need a business model to support that.
DeathArrow 4y ago
> Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google I think it can't be solved without humans curating or vouching for content.
OOPMan 4y ago
Given that it seems to be companies like Google that have created this problem....maybe we don't want a new Google...

nico 4y ago

Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. The ChatGPT user-experience is mind-blowing, but when you start using their API and see, partly, how the sausage is made, you realize that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion. But that’s exactly where the magic of the experience is, and what gives ChatGPT it’s edge. Google should just launch a “chatux” version of their search.

napier 4y ago
Have you tried Bingchat yet? It’s rumoured to be using a more advanced model from OAI than ChatGPT or Davinci and is very often surprisingly excellent.
- nico 4y ago
  Keep reading great things about it. Will have to try it. Thank you for the recommendation!
- wetpaws 4y ago
  It is so low heavily lobotomized that 99% I find much better results with chatgpt even though it is technically an older model.
  - nirav72 4y ago
    I've noticed the same thing. Other than generating code examples - I found it be useless for search. I've had better luck using a third-party extension that inserts web search context into the ChatGPT than using Bing chat to search for something.
    - nico 4y ago
      Could you mention or link the extension here? Thank you!
      - nirav72 4y ago
        Sure. The one I'm using is WebChatGPT: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webchatgpt-chatgpt-with-i/lpfemeioodjbpieminkklglpmhlngfcn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webchatgpt-chatgpt... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-chatgpt/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-chatgpt/?... note - I haven't tried the firefox version. But the chrome one works fine in Brave. Edit: Source for the above extension: https://github.com/qunash/chatgpt-advanced https://github.com/qunash/chatgpt-advanced
- beauzero 4y ago
  I was pretty decent early on. Now I just use it to augment copilot...generally when I don't have a specific "start" but just an idea...works better than dumping a comment into copilot. I was hoping with the 3 tabs creative -> more exact it would be a little better but I haven't seen any difference. It isn't quite as interesting as when it was regularly hallucinating. I found the hallucinations to bubble up inspiration...forgotten facts, unused paths, etc.
jsenn 4y ago
> that the context-awareness is just a very well done illusion Could you expand on this? The context awareness is the part that blows my mind. I would be disappointed/fascinated to find out that it’s “just” a simple set of tricks!
- nico 4y ago
  ChatGPT is “only” a chat interface to GPT. GPT basically has access to two contexts: its internals, and the prompt that it gets Then when you ask something to ChatGPT, it takes your prompt and it generates a new prompt that includes the previous messages in your session, so that GPT can use them as context. But, there’s a limit to the size of the prompt. And it’s not that big. So then ChatGPT’s magic is figuring out how to crafts prompts, within the size limits, to feed GPT, so that it has enough context to give a good answer. Essentially, ChatGPT is some really amazing prompt-engineering system with a great interface.
  - jsenn 4y ago
    That makes sense. So ChatGPT has to use some cleverness to present the relevant previous text in the current prompt, but the language model is still responsible for pulling out the meaning of that context and responding appropriately. I remain mind-blown :)
    - nico 4y ago
      Exactly. Very eloquently put.
passion__desire 4y ago
[0] : "You can try doing a web search with the URL, but Frankly, I haven't had much success with that." In my experience, Bing is the best search engine for finding info on deleted videos – for example: bing.com/search?q=youtu.be/t1wjL4BqXlI 1st result shows title of video: "Awolnation "Sail" – Unlimited Gravity Remix" [1] Daniel Dennett talking about why we should still support explicit string search. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/3876476/how-to-find-video-info-for-now-deleted-videos?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/3876476/how-to-fin... [1] https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1330 https://youtu.be/arEvPIhOLyQ?t=1330
sangnoir 4y ago
> Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. Wasn't ChatGPT3 trained on web content with a cutoff of 2021? Future ChatGPT versions will likely be trained on data tainted by AI-generated fluff, and will face the same challenges Google is facing with today's web content.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Yeah someone needs to figure out how to get a continuously trained online model up and running without running the risk of people figuring out how to exploit it
- jmbwell 4y ago
  And when this serpent starts eating its tail and the AI starts returning highly-ranked results consisting of AI-generated content, … well, I hope I can move to a farm by then.
  - nico 4y ago
    It’s been like that since humans have been around. That’s the way knowledge spreads. We humans have been repeating and imitating ourselves forever. That’s even the way babies learn to talk. And we are not all clones, we don’t all think, say or do exactly the same things. But most just repeat and consume the same content and ideas (movies, music, books, languages, media).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mfcl 4y ago
      (Why are you being downvoted?) I think the important part is to have a minimum of filtering. Humans consume knowledge brought by others humans, but most of the time we cherry pick the true and useful knowledge and reject what turns out to be false (ideally). I think what AI brings to the table is automation and speed, but the quality is not better. So if AI starts consuming its own content, will that decrease the quality of knowledge* in general? (*Here I mean the first knowledge you quickly get from a search or asking some AI, not what you could get after hours/days of research.)
bagacrap 4y ago
Why were you using a web search if you didn't want to access the web (find a website)? Openai says don't use chatgpt for search. Microsoft says double check everything Sydney tells you. Is there an argument for LLMs replacing search besides laziness?
- imachine1980_ 4y ago
  If this works as we wish(no saying that is posible), this will reduce the amount of seo spam trash you read to 0%, will allow to investigate things faster, and will allow to have more recursive way to expore topics. And this will be key to make ok google more similar at what we wish as ai companion
- simonster 4y ago
  It seems inevitable that LLMs will eventually work for search. They just don't work yet.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    It really does not seem inevitable at all if you know how the tech works under the hood. The trust problem can't be solved with the current approach.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    So will the LLMs be able to stay current with 24 hour news and updates? And will users be able to get a link to any sources if they ask so they can verify or go the website as desired? Will those websites still have a reason to exist if they're just being used to feed the search LLMs?
    - bagacrap 4y ago
      All difficult questions that will need to be answered in the affirmative if the web is going to survive. The only well-funded player that is really incentivized to make all these things happen is Google, as literally every other megacorp wants you to be stuck in their walled gardens instead of searching the web.
userbinator 4y ago
Does ChatGPT know things like part numbers for mid-80s ICs by Japanese manufacturers? That's what I use search for. Unfortunately Google is getting worse at those queries, but I doubt AI is going to be better. Beware of wanting "answers" or "solutions" --- that's a slippery slope towards complacency and loss of agency, replaced by corporate subservience. Classic example: instead of finding a service manual or discussions on repairing something, AI may try to convince you to buy a new one.
- gmadsen 4y ago
  that seems like exactly something bing could give you
- ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
  ChatGPT does surprisingly well at this task. My question was very biased towards it knowing the answer because I asked it for examples of mid-80s Japanese ICs when google failed me, but it definitely knows a ton of model numbers for real parts from the era. Give it a shot with a real-world example and report back
  - amrocha 4y ago
    The point is that you can't trust it because language models are bullshitters. What's the point of a search you have to verify through another search afterwards.
    - masfuerte 4y ago
      As long as it's not wrong too often, a black box that coughs up answers which are hard to find but easy to verify is very useful.
      - nico 4y ago
        Great way to put it!
      - amrocha 4y ago
nirav72 4y ago
>while using ChatGPT more and more. I'm assuming you're using ChatGPT to validate/generate technical solutions such as code and not necessarily searching for specific information? If its for information search, then how do you deal with the fact that at times it tends to make up a things that are factually incorrect or logically inconsistent?
- ruszki 4y ago
  By using Google to verify. It’s still okayish to find out whether a statement is true or not. The problem is that Google is becoming worse to find that statement. For example, I wanted to figure out how I should replace a given dependency. Google was terrible, so was Stackoverflow. ChatGPT gave me a guess. For such questions it’s quite right in about 3/4th of the queries, and when I search for the given guess Google finds it immediately whether it’s fine or not.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    And what happens if something like ChatGPT replaces Google entirely?
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Current plans for language-model-driven search is to have the answers driven by a normal search index. So the LLM can run ask to run a web search and the result gets copypasted back into its input prompt. Basically, it's Googling for you and summarizing the result. Which makes me wonder how long until websites figure out how to convince the index to do prompt injections that wouldn't fool an actual human looking at results on a search engine results page.
    - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
      There are other search engines, such as Marginalia. The bigger question is what happens if websites start disappearing, this is a bigger problem than you might think because even websites like Wikipedia, reference news websites, which are visitor- and therefore ad-driven.
Groxx 4y ago
It'll probably look something like this.
krupan 4y ago
Is this actually giving you good results? The few times I tried to use chatGPT instead of google I got terrible results: - Horrible and wrong driving directions - Buggy incomplete code - long winded explanations of how it was just a chat AI and not a whatever whatever blah blah blah I found it to be tedious and incredibly untrustworthy
- sethjgore 4y ago
  You have to be specific. It is surprisingly good when I asked it to respond like a software engineer expert then gave a very specific problem it spits out no issue
subsection1h 4y ago
> Most of the times I want an answer or a solution Are you not interested in ensuring that the answer or solution is based on the most authoritative information that exists, the source material on which all regurgitations are based? Do you generally not read technical specifications or research papers, and instead prefer the kind of content that is accompanied by a green check mark?
- carbonguy 4y ago
  > Are you not interested in ensuring that the answer or solution is based on the most authoritative information that exists, the source material on which all regurgitations are based? Not OP, but I'll answer: No, I am almost never interested in finding the most authoritative source for anything, because the effort vs. reward of those searches is not favorable and the cost of being incorrect on any given point is pretty dang low. EDIT: However, with respect to the idea of using ChatGPT for answering general knowledge questions - there's enough demonstrations of it providing fabricated information that I've adopted the low-cost heuristic of not trusting ChatGPT for anything and preferring to seek information elsewhere. I guess this means I seek moderately-authoritative sources (say, Wikipedia) as a general rule.
- clnq 4y ago
  > prefer the kind of content that is accompanied by a green check mark? For most searches, yes.
piokoch 4y ago
I was already there... I abandoned Altavista since Google was so much better. Until Google became spammed too and no longer seems to be much better than Altavista.
ihatepython 4y ago
> Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. > It’s pretty rare that I want to find a website or document. Most of the times I want an answer or a solution, and ChatGPT is so much better at that than google. It seems P. T. Barnum was correct, There's a sucker born every minute. When I'm searching, I don't want an answer. I'm looking for the truth, which is probably buried somewhere. At this point, my biggest fear with "AI" is ChatGPT-powered Customer Service agents.
vidarh 4y ago
Yesterday, instead of trying to search for information on the interaction between the tangential velocity of an O'Neill cylinder and internal air speed and how it'd be affected by various other factors, I asked ChatGPT, and was able to keep probing it with questions and have it explain pieces I didn't get first time around. It gave me the formulas to solve various problems I stated, showed how to use them, have me relevant keywords to dig into further. It was so much better than searching and hoping to find something close enough to be able to figure out the missing bits myself. I have found plenty of things where ChatGPT falls totally apart, and I still had to try some things a couple of times because my initial wording caused it to veer off in the wrong direction, but when it works it's truly amazing... Where it truly shines is where there's nothing in Google that answers exactly what I want, but plenty of explanations of how to solve different aspects of the problem which ChatGPT can assemble and plug things into...
- nico 4y ago
  Exactly! One of my best experiences has been asking ChatGPT to explain physical models, give me equations, change some parameters, evaluate/solve the equations or give me code to run and solve the model, iterating with it along the way. It is definitely not perfect, but in those iterative cases when trying to learn something new, in a field that you are familiar with (so you can tell or at least can quickly check, if it’s wrong or right).
waynesonfire 4y ago
> Everyday I’m using Google search less and less, while using ChatGPT more and more. its just wrong so often and I just end up having to verify everything on google anyway.

mjevans 4y ago

Back of napkin approach: Allow-list some sites that already have a good reputation for useful results (probably anything scraped for summary snips). Penalize all other sites based on the quantity of ads and similar non-content. Use the old web search core on what's left.

ssklash 4y ago
Kagi lets you do exactly this. You can allow/block list certain site results, or create a curated list of domains to include results from.

lunfard000 4y ago

Websites are seo-ing Reddit now (shit things like: Top ten airfryer recommended by Reddit), so appending reddit is not enough anymore. In a very close future we are going to have to type the whole site:reddit.com.

whatevaa 4y ago
Well, I already do that today. Probably won't help too much, though, cause AI will generate some legit looking posts/comments and you will have a hard time figuring out if they are written by a bot or person.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Exactly. I keep coming back to the fact that, between all the different ways AI can generate content, the entire user-contributed-internet is about to be completely flooded with amicable and true-sounding nonsense with a peppering of whatever viewpoint the bot-runner wants to push. I honestly don't see any way out besides Digital ID -- if a person has to provide the host with information about who they really are, then once they're discovered the host can actually prevent further abuse. Otherwise, a single person can create infinite bots to shill whatever product or viewpoint they want. Which is why I have conspiracy theories about the conspiracy theories about digital ID. The same actors who use the internet to push misinformation benefit from anonymity.
  - pictureofabear 4y ago
    It's almost like the Matrix but in cyberspace where humans are constantly trying to escape the bots, except instead of mining the humans for energy, the bots are mining data.
  - antifa 4y ago
    > the entire user-contributed-internet is about to be completely flooded with amicable and true-sounding nonsense with a peppering of whatever viewpoint the bot-runner wants to push. Feels like that's already happened before ChatGPT.
- 4y ago

izzydata 4y ago

My solution is to go back to meat space and physical libraries of information.

JohnFen 4y ago
It's seriously hard to beat libraries. For a while, it looked like the internet was making them less instrumental, but I think the balance started tipping back toward them a few years back.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  My local library doesn't even have tech books.
  - wl 4y ago
    Interlibrary loans.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Oh, so much this. It's a library superpower that shockingly few people are aware of. At any US public library, you can borrow books from every other public library in the nation -- even including the Library of Congress.

avereveard 4y ago

> Can’t wait to see how this affects hn comments over the next 5 years I think new form of comment ranking will take over, all those system we're building to detect ai spam will also double as scoring system to evaluate content originality. the problem will be to differentiate good original content and bad original content, but that can be left to flagging systems.

coldtea 4y ago

>Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google If it's solvable. There are many problems that aren't. Perhaps the new Google would just be a 1996-era Yahoo! human-curated catalog.

philote 4y ago
I've often wanted something like that yahoo catalog. I miss the days of being able to browse categories of sites.
- tremon 4y ago
  My hope is for something like YaCy with a web-of-trust overlay. I'd want it to only show results from peers that I trust, and if garbage starts showing up in my search results, I want to know from which peer it came so I can un-trust it. Which in my mind is somewhat of a middle ground between a search engine and a directory: what I'd want is a whitelist of curated directories that contain domains to be crawled by my search engine.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    Ditto. I would like a fuzzy web of trust: I specify connections that I trust explicitly, and it provides results from that network out N steps. Each hop reduces the confidence value. And yeah, cited sources so I can un-trust sources of junk.
- Minor49er 4y ago
  You'll probably enjoy Curlie (created by the former DMOZ maintainers) and Neocities (try out different tags for better results) https://curlie.org/en https://curlie.org/en https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=last_updated https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=last_updated
nosduhz 4y ago
I sure hope so. It's part of the approach we're taking for e-commerce search with https://shopdeft.com https://shopdeft.com

guluarte 4y ago

sadly closed gardens like reddit, human moderation is the way to go

stockhorn 4y ago

How about letting the users flag each website with a label "seo spam", "useful", " fakenews", "inaccurate"... and display a summary of the votes as a badge beneath each link in the search results? We could create a browser extension to add this functionality to all search engines at once. Using a web of trust mechanism to ensure that we only get real votes... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999285

pushfoo 4y ago
Spammers would submit fake tags faster than everyday users. Since this is a social problem rather than a technical one, maybe old-school trust networks are worth considering instead.
- bnjms 4y ago
  I assume implicitly that votes only count for users two degrees of separation from you and it’s tied to real life friends registry. Wish FB hasn’t happened and the web of trust stuff turned into something useful.
  - pushfoo 4y ago
    I don't think real life is the main issue. Instead, it seems like the same issue PGP has: the benefits never outweighed the bad UX for most people.
    - colinsane 4y ago
      you probably don’t even need explicit voting. Google already tries to figure out which results a person found useful just based on existing UI interactions, and use that in the rankings. if they operated a significant social media arm, they could link these two datasets to basically the same effect we’re all speaking of here. heck they maybe already do this in a different/more hierarchical form based on a person’s Youtube graph.
      - 4y ago

wilsonnb3 4y ago

We're already drowning in an ocean of SEO bullshit without help from AI. Adding another ocean isn't really going to change anything IMO.

hedora 4y ago
Within the next 12 months, I think AI is going to produce a million times more SEO bullshit than humans can.
clnq 4y ago
Maybe it’s time for the pile of trash to topple. We could go back to the mindset of using specific sites for information and the internet more like a tool than a source of casual content for scrolling and browsing. Or so one can dream.

Gigachad 4y ago

We already have smartasses copy pasting chatgpt responses in to comments here. It's easy to tell at this point because chatgpt always gives overly verbose and polite, positive comments. Which is completely out of character for a HN user.

nmfisher 4y ago
Once someone creates SmarmyNerdGPT, it's all over for HN.
- _AzMoo 4y ago
  Ask ChatGPT for a comment, then tell it to "do it again but make it snarky".
- Gigachad 4y ago
  SmarmyNerdGPT is a pointless product. You could have done this with bash scripts and curl. Why would anyone pay for this?
  - Yiin 4y ago
    no one said anything about that being a product
    - voakbasda 4y ago
      Exactly. Far too many people just want to watch the world burn.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Why write in bash when you can write in rust
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      we all know that the lambda calculus is the only true way to produce software or to think about ruining the world, really at scale. If you're not using functional programming to ruin the world what are you doing really.

rchaud 4y ago

I have a sinking feeling that the 'solution' will be to use a "good AI" to combat the bad AI churning out ad ridden clickbait listicles in perpetuity.

worldofmatthew 4y ago

I suspect that old fashioned website directories and webrings will come more into popularity.

kaoD 4y ago

> Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google I bet it's something as easy as "derank pages with ads". Now you just need a business model to support that.

DeathArrow 4y ago

> Whoever solves this problem will probably get to be the new google I think it can't be solved without humans curating or vouching for content.

OOPMan 4y ago

Given that it seems to be companies like Google that have created this problem....maybe we don't want a new Google...