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> I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble. Yes

> I think "Search" will be changing dramatically over the next year or two. And websites which depend on Search traffic to survive will be in deep trouble. Yes, and no. A lot of sites generate crap content as it is. Not all search queries are just questions that can be answered, some are looking for businesses, shopping items, legal help, etc things that ChatGPT, etc can't emulate. AI will hurt sites like Reddit/StackOverflow/Quora, etc which answer -actual- questions. The issue is that once that happens there will be less and less content to solve random issues and ChatGPT, etc will not have been trained on them creating a bit of a gap. Then couple that with all the junk AI articles people will be publishing, it will be increasingly more difficult to solve minor issues that you randomly come across. ChatGPT/Midjourney, etc right now is just feeding into the "Dead Internet." I'd say currently, on net, it has been more of a bad thing than a good thing. That may change, or it could get worse.

vineyardmike 3y ago
> some are looking for businesses, shopping items, legal help, etc things that ChatGPT, etc can't emulate. Except it can. It doesn’t have to try and “remember” the details in its weights, it can RAG and all sorts of fun tricks. As Google’s Search Generative Experience shows, LLM interfaces don’t have to be strictly chat. These tools surface and aggregate existing content, instead of hallucinating new ones. It can’t stop people from pasting generated content into Reddit, but it can be used for actual search. Imagine just asking ChatGPT (or more likely, Gemini) for “space heater recommendations for a 300sqft office in a shed” and having the LLM walk you through the options - you no longer need to use a UI to toggle filters, and you don’t need to explicitly throw keywords into a search bar and hope you picked the right ones. Regarding the “dead internet” - you’ll always have humans create new content. People wanna talk about their interests on Reddit. That won’t change. People will file bug reports and new code in GitHub. Companies will post support articles. Journals will publish research papers. These “good” sources will still exist because there are external reasons to. The only thing that will die are the SEO crap now that they’re really not special.

vineyardmike 3y ago

> some are looking for businesses, shopping items, legal help, etc things that ChatGPT, etc can't emulate. Except it can. It doesn’t have to try and “remember” the details in its weights, it can RAG and all sorts of fun tricks. As Google’s Search Generative Experience shows, LLM interfaces don’t have to be strictly chat. These tools surface and aggregate existing content, instead of hallucinating new ones. It can’t stop people from pasting generated content into Reddit, but it can be used for actual search. Imagine just asking ChatGPT (or more likely, Gemini) for “space heater recommendations for a 300sqft office in a shed” and having the LLM walk you through the options - you no longer need to use a UI to toggle filters, and you don’t need to explicitly throw keywords into a search bar and hope you picked the right ones. Regarding the “dead internet” - you’ll always have humans create new content. People wanna talk about their interests on Reddit. That won’t change. People will file bug reports and new code in GitHub. Companies will post support articles. Journals will publish research papers. These “good” sources will still exist because there are external reasons to. The only thing that will die are the SEO crap now that they’re really not special.