211–220 of 264 posts
Any other website, where people just share information freely, where you might get different opinions, experiences, hell, _anything that is different from just trying to sell you something_ (even if it is ads), will be very far in the back.
I think eventually more people will realize that the modern web is terrible and they will get fed up with it. People are already building alternatives. There are several situations that could cause Google to lose a foothold as the search behemoth and drive consumers to find alternate ways to find products. Possible catalysts include: regulation of search or advertising negatively affecting google, an unknown search c…
For 1) we have an open app platform that allows everybody to collaborate on that first entry of the web
For 2) We let people decide the sources they want to see and if they don't like a source or app, they can downvote it and see it less in their ranker.
We will try to decentralize more over time though it's a big effort to make it fast enough still.
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GPT-3 and DALL-E scare me. This is too good. I wonder how long it will take before we have a GPT-3 bot commenting here on HN
GPT-3 authored content was already top of HN not long ago https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news...
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I wouldn't buy the tickets sight unseen, but I would trust you that it's actually a real place, actually in Croatia, and not being conflated with similar-sounding places. Humans, unless they're disturbed or malicious, tend not to hallucinate things out of whole cloth.
So... we’ve got ML models to the point of being able to hallucinate?
Something like coming to accept some data-set local optima as a global truth and deriving beliefs without underlying basis.
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I disagree. The fact that Google has such a power over the shape of web traffic, along with a few other websites, absolutely re-shapes the Internet to fit whatever its standards make a website rank well. It's in many ways almost exactly the same process as natural selection. Whatever works gets traffic and gets copied by other websites, whatever doesn't fades away.
I think the analogy to natural selection is apt. So is it really Google's fault? Seems like a consequence of a fitness function. And even if there were 4 competitive search engines in the world, each spammy site would optimize for one (or would even have 4 versions that each optimized for a single search engine).
I'm sure it's not Google's intention to ruin the web, it's just something they happily accept as a by-product of their optimization strategy towards maximum value extraction via ads. Like some chicken farmers happily accepting creating chicken hell because it lowers cost. I don't think they set out to torture chickens and go "hey, I'll start a chicken farm as a cover story".
90% of content writers that I have talked during product validation are using Google to search for writing financial content. They mirrored the sentiment of the author that search results have gotten significantly worse and do not provide much auxiliary insights. The noise/hit ratio is really high. Interestingly, Google Search works really well for Stack Overflow.
Maybe it's because people who use these kinds of websites are generally less tolerant of BS websites than the average person, so Google tends to derank the crappy ones just because we always click away instantly.
> What I dream of is Google circa 2006. A time where a search engine searched what you asked for. A time before aggressive SEO. A time before social media, when the only people on the internet had a reason to be there. A time before sticky headers and full-screen modal pop-ups asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before reading the article. A time before click-bait and subscription-only websites which tease you wi…
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GPT-3 prompt: I really love the vibe of Koh Lanta in Thailand. It has tourist amenities without really being touristy. I find it charming, slow and cheap. Is there a place in Croatia like it? Completion: There is no exact place in Croatia that has the same vibe as Koh Lanta in Thailand. However, there are places in Croatia that have a similar charm and slower pace. These places include Hvar Island, Korcula Island, an…
The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the…
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Except that “improving search” here means maximizing Google profits, from ads in particular, as opposed to what users would consider an improvement to search.
There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of people working on search. Some of them are interested in and interface with the business side but I'm sure most of them have objectives just related to search. It's possible they've found and not implemented massive improvements because it's getting sat on by higher ups who are more aware of the business and objectives of the ads teams. If that were the case though…