2 ms·
I think the issue is that the classical search engine model has increasingly become less useful. There's less experts using search engines. Normal people treat
by dale_glass 1y ago
I think the issue is that the classical search engine model has increasingly become less useful.
There's less experts using search engines. Normal people treat search engines less like an index search and more like a person. Asking an old school search engine "What is the capital of USA" is actually not quite right, because the "what is" is probably quite superfluous, and you're counting on finding some sort of educative website with the answer. In fact phrasing it as "the capital of the USA is" is probably a better fit for a search engine, since that's the sort of sentence that would contain what you want to know.
Also with the plague of "SEO", there's a million sites trying to convince Google that their site is relevant even when it's not.
So LLMs are increasingly more and more relevant at informally phrased queries that don't actually contain relevant key words, and they're also much more useful in that they bypass a lot of pointless verbiage, spam, ads and requests to subscribe.
- atrettel 1y agoThis is a great point. I'll add that search engines are also unclear about what kind of output they give. As you point out, search engines accept both questions and key words as queries. Arguably you'd want completely different searches/answers for those. Moreover, search engines no longer just output web sites with the key words but also give an "AI overview" in an attempt to keep you on their site, which is contrary to what search engines have traditionally done. Previously search engines were something you pass through but they now try to position themselves as destinations instead. I'd argue that search engines should stick to just outputting relevant websites and let LLMs give you an overview. Both technologies are complimentary and fulfill different roles.
- agentultra 1y agoMost search engines will parse the query sentence much more intelligently than that. It's not literally matching every word and hasn't for decades. I just tried a handful of popular search engines, they all return the appropriate responses and links.
- dale_glass 1y agoThey're not that literal anymore of course, but they still don't compare to an LLM. In the end it's still mostly searching for key words even if with a few tweaks here and there, and the ability to answer vague questions mostly works by finding forums and Reddit posts where people ask that specific question and hopefully get an answer. When you're asking a standard question like the capital of whatever, that works great. When you have one of those weird issues, it often lands you in a thread somewhere in the Ubuntu forums where people tried to help this person, nothing worked, and the thread died 3 years ago. Just the fact that LLMs can translate between languages already adds an amazing amount of usefulness that search engines can't have. There seems to be a fair amount of obscure technical info that's only available in Russian for some reason.
- agentultra 1y ago> they still don't compare to an LLM Of course they don't. One is a program for seaching a corpus of data for items relevant to a query. The other generates items from a corpus of data.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zahlman 1y agoMeanwhile, I'm increasingly frustrated by my inability to find a service where I can search for keywords I want and keywords I don't want, and reliably check the offered links, ctrl-f for the wanted keywords and find them, and ctrl-f for the unwanted keywords and fail to find them. Oh, and apparently I can completely forget about search that cares about non-alphanumeric characters whatsoever.