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AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#151

Post by tmpburning »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

> I am ready to pay for something like ChatGPT.

they put too many restrictions on which answers ChatGPT is allowed to give though...

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#152

Post by _huayra_ »

lolinder wrote: post #106
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks

I agree that Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time. That's the only reason why an LLM chatbot is seen by anyone as a viable replacement. But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.

I was pleased at first when I tried to use ChatGPT as a search engine. I asked something like "give me the top 5 blog posts to learn about C++ metaprogramming" and it actually spit out extremely plausible titles from top people (e.g. Dave Abrahams, Eric Niebler, Herb Sutter, etc), but when I said "no please give me the actual URLs", they were all 404.

If Microsoft somehow is able to implement the information synthesis (e.g. "give me an example of C++ metaprogramming, using Boost Hana") with actual indexed links from sources, that would probably be the one thing I'd see in the near-ish term that could upset the search engine balance of power.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#154

Post by tag2103 »

grugagag wrote: post #118
rtkwe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.

If we only had a downvote or don’t show me results from this source this problem would be solved. Google didn’t want to give us that feature because of … different incentives, no other reason comes to mind. I’ve witnessed google search become worse and worse and now it’s barely useful

I know they would not do this but you aren't the only one that thinks in those veins. I'm so tired of all of the pinterest spam I pretty much gave up on google for anything other than code searches which funny enough can be done better and more naturally through a GPT type AI.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#155

Post by solardev »

lolinder wrote: post #86
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

The problem with ChatGPT as a replacement for Google is that it was not designed to produce accurate facts, and it shows. This model cut its teeth writing articles about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes[0] for goodness sake! It's a language model, and a very impressive one at that, but language is used to express falsehoods and fiction just as regularly as it is used to express truth. This doesn't mean that it…

What makes you think Google is good at finding facts?

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#156

Post by 22289d »

gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

> ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents

Not yet. Today, ChatGPT is bad with facts. Don't rely on what it tells you.

But that appears to be the future. And it sounds great.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#158

Post by wizofaus »

gerad wrote: post #148

No, they won't replace search engines, but they could weaponize the generation of SEO content spam to the point where search engines become overwhelmed and irrelevant.

But at the point people stop using general purpose search engines because there's so much content spam that they're unable to distinguish from genuine material, then there's no further motivation for anyone to keep the content spam bots going, until the search engines' own SEO-detection AI catches up. Some sort of arms-race is likely inevitable, but I'm not convinced GPT-based tech is going to especially favour one side over the other.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#160

Post by scarface74 »

I used ChatGPT last week to accelerate a “DevOps” project that I had. It involved writing a bunch of relatively simple Python scripts that transformed source JSON to specifically formatted yaml.

I just told it my input and my desired output and it wrote the code perfectly. Then I kept refining the script with more specific instructions.

I also needed to document sone scripts that I previously wrote. I just copy and pasted the script into ChatGPT and asked it what does it do and used that for my README.

I even used it to create a simple FAQ for my scripts and asked “Why would you use it”? The answer to why you would use my scripts jibed with the reality.

Another use case was that I was trying to get a friend interview ready for an eventual AWS tech support position. I just sent him a series of interview questions that I would ask at an interview and told him to put those questions in ChatGPT (I had already vetted a few).

I would ask questions like “compare and contrast X and Y”? “when would you use X”? “how can you save money with Y”?

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