True!
AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
211–220 of 415 posts
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 synthesi…
ChatGPT gives me the urls when i asked a similar question for go programming. My guess is its an engineering integration in the nascent stages.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#213AI chatbots(or equivalent AI answering machines) vs Search Engines Search has 2 kinds of users. 1 trawls through multiple pages of results to find what they are looking for. This is you and me but we are in minority. 2 clicks on the first link(or sometimes 2nd) and that's the end of that particular search. The majority. 2nd will decide the winners Academics, being the 1st kind are the reasons for arguments like those…
For most of the world, not using add blockers, those first and second (and third??) links are ads, so those users are not just providing the majority of clicks, they're providing virtually all of the clicks that make money.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#214Earlier 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.
In the future, the source might be written by ChatGPT anyway.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#215[deleted]
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Google is terrible at its job and produces garbage most of the time Are we using the same search engine? I use DuckDuckGo most of the time but Google is hardly terrible, even if it could be improved. I find what I’m looking for in the top results 90-95% of the time. The other 5-10% also contains times where there simply isn’t a good link that solves what I’m looking for even after digging hard.
> Are we using the same search engine? I use DuckDuckGo most of the time
Then you are not using the same engine!
(I also use DDG and find its results superior to google).
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#217The 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…
What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early…
This is a problem now, but I'm getting tired of these articles seeing a current limitation and acting as if that limitation will be the case forever. They'll iron out some wrinkles over time.
Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#218For me, ChatGPT has already replaced Google for most queries, so the point is moot. Even if ChatGPT is flawed, it's still way better than Google. Using Google feels stupid; trying different search terms and clicking through dozens of websites with cookie popups and skimming all the bloated content for an answer which might be close to something you're looking for. ChatGPT gives the answer instantly. I don't believe t…
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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than regular intelligence? We grow up trained on a polluted dataset, being taught things that are subtly or completely false, and we often struggle to tell which things we have learned are false.
And what was the result of unchecked faulty learning on a corrupt dataset by natural intelligence? Dark ages where millions died in pointless wars over who's imaginary diety is the true one. A third of europe dying of preventable plague. It took a rigorous system of citation and a publically funded system of education to crawl out of the drakness. Should we try AI powred dark ages but with resource shortage and nucle…
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Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines
#220I feel like most people are trying to give personality to AI chatbots. From what I have read, ChatGPT is good at carrying conversations and doing text based work. I would focus on feeding it curated info and making its answers as factually correct as possible. And some way to know the sources of information it picked up answers from. Companies and people are going to do that anyway in the coming future. We may see chatbots good at a certain field, and whose results can be trusted.