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ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

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Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#271

Post by LewisVerstappen »

m3kw9 wrote: post #265
benmorris wrote: post #162

ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions. I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things. - solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging. - refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern - si…

I asked many questions and it usually fail to answer the tougher or very specific situational ones.

Give some examples?

I use ChatGPT for 200-300 queries per day and it’s astonishingly accurate.

I’ll double check with Google if I’m unsure but it’s almost always been correct.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#272

Post by xp84 »

radium3d wrote: post #249
mfDjB wrote: post #171

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work fo…

I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best info…

They probably didn't lose their way, so much as they slowly became less effective at combatting the exploits of black-hat SEO and the massive amount of complete garbage content farms out there, while simultaneously they have allowed the ad business to corrupt them completely, which deincentivizes them from showing good organic results because they sell more ads when it's hard to find the obvious things people want.

Your hypothesis on performance is interesting! I think someone altruistic thought "if we judge sites on this metric, everyone will be forced to do better" but they failed to realize that it's a hard problem at scale to NOT be a bloated mess (especially on the frontend! 'Let's add one more UI library, it's just 12MB!')

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#273

Post by flir »

I've found that if I give it a pair of questions ("Why does X breed faster than Y", "Why does Y breed faster than X") it'll give me two neat little responses that explain why both these statements are true.

That doesn't sound useful on the surface of things, but the additional information in the responses allowed me to craft more traditional search queries I wouldn't have thought of (in my example I learned that species X is hermaphroditic, and that water temperature may be having an impact).

So replace? No. Enhance, if used carefully? Maybe, for now.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#274

Post by 2342346666 »

mfDjB wrote: post #171

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work fo…

> if anything its getting worse.

It's gotten a lot worst and it will probably get replaced by GPT4 or its successor.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#275

Post by xp84 »

retinaros wrote: post #242
mfDjB wrote: post #171

For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work fo…

google is an advertisement company not a search one. and chagpt as soon as they start to be in the business of search engines will be one too. that is the fate of any tool that is free to use

The notion that every information service should be free with ads is one of the main poisons that have made the cesspool that is the net today. Imagine how different the incentives would be if Facebook and Google just made money by making their endusers happy enough to keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee. Their customers would be the end users, instead of being the advertisers.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#276

Post by cloudking »

I think folks are really underestimating Google in this space. They have:

1) access to way more data than what ChatGPT was trained on

2) access to data freshness through their crawlers

3) knowledge graph for a source of truth https://blog.google/products/search/about-knowledge-graph-an...

4) their own large language model LaMDA, that is apparently so good it convinced a senior AI researcher that it was sentient https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/ https://www.engadget.com/blake-lemoide-fired-google-lamda-se...

5) researchers that invented Transformers that GPT is modeled after https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-n...

6) Ray Kurzweil leading the Google Brain team with a mission to make computers understand natural language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Google pioneered this space. They also happen to already have an Assistant that is on billions of devices...

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#277

Post by daguava »

ekianjo wrote: post #262
ravenstine wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academi…

> I suggest giving Kagi a try Does not have a sound business model. Let's not waste time on something that is not viable.

[flagged]

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#278

Post by jamesrom »

munchler wrote: post #238
jamesrom wrote: post #216

The main argument of this article is: 1. ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. 2. Search engines provide some interesting features that ChatGPT doesn't. These are both bad assumptions looking forward: 1. It's evident that ChatGPT or other chat-based text generation will only improve over time. These kinds of quirky edge cases will _always_ exist, but will be harder and harder to contrive. 2. These sorts of…

> ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. No. ChatGPT has no idea of the truth value of anything it produces. That's fine for writing fiction, but it's not an "edge condition" when searching for actual information.

I'd love for you to explain how a search engine does have any idea of truth.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#279

Post by bg24 »

munchler wrote: post #238
jamesrom wrote: post #216

The main argument of this article is: 1. ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. 2. Search engines provide some interesting features that ChatGPT doesn't. These are both bad assumptions looking forward: 1. It's evident that ChatGPT or other chat-based text generation will only improve over time. These kinds of quirky edge cases will _always_ exist, but will be harder and harder to contrive. 2. These sorts of…

> ChatGPT gets tripped up in some edge conditions. No. ChatGPT has no idea of the truth value of anything it produces. That's fine for writing fiction, but it's not an "edge condition" when searching for actual information.

I am curious if search engine is the same? It has little idea of truth value of what it produces, other than prioritizing known and well-referenced resources.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#280

Post by flir »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #271
m3kw9 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked many questions and it usually fail to answer the tougher or very specific situational ones.

Give some examples? I use ChatGPT for 200-300 queries per day and it’s astonishingly accurate. I’ll double check with Google if I’m unsure but it’s almost always been correct.

I've found that if you give it pairs of "Why..." questions it'll happily argue both sides of the coin ("Why is X better than Y", "Why is Y better than X"). But in giving me justifications, it gives me fodder for further traditional searches. I don't trust it to give me a correct answer, but I do trust it to define the problem space a bit.
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