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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

#301

Post by alwayslikethis »

jsnell wrote: post #235
charlieyu1 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even understand why Google doesn't allow blocking some sites in search results. Paid ads, I understand, these generate profits. Although Facebook still allow me to remove some ads that I don't want to see. But unpaid SEO rubbish, how does it benefit Google at all? If anything these parasites bogs down the quality of search results

They had a feature to block domains from search results in the past (like, 10 years ago). It was removed. I don't know why, but it feels like exactly the kind of feature that sounds great on paper but doesn't actually survive contact with real users. First, I'd bet that very few people are actually interested in doing that kind of manual curation or engaging with power user features. How large a % of users need to in…

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

#302

Post by tmabraham »

cloudking wrote: post #276

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…

> 4) their own large language model LaMDA, that is apparently so good it convinced a senior AI researcher that it was sentient

Oh come on, that guy would be convinced that ELIZA is sentient

> 5) researchers that invented Transformers that GPT is modeled after Only one researcher from that paper remains at Google, the rest have gone on to work at or found their own startups. The so-called "Google Brain drain" is certainly a concern (although there still are many great researchers there).

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

#303

Post by eternalban »

blep_ wrote: post #257
eternalban wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked ChatGPT to emulate various OS's, including Linux and DOS. On a linux emulation, I had it curl whatsmyip.com. This bit was in the response: 35.230.98.61 That's a google property. I wonder if it was trained on google's cloud.

Or, more likely, it made up a plausible IP address .

The curls have returned two distinct IPs. Both are google's. How probable is that for a plausible guess? Run the experiment yourself. There was an article a while back that shows the prompt preamble to get you going. See what you get.

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

#304

Post by palata »

There are two things I have been wondering about ChatGPT:

1. What impact will it have on search engines? With ChatGPT, it will be easy to automate the creation of websites, which will be referenced by search engines, right? So maybe someday half of the results will just be generated websites that may or may not say complete nonsense in an authoritative way.

2. Will the successors of ChatGPT learn from websites generated by ChatGPT, too? What happens when the new model learns from outputs from previous iterations?

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

#305

Post by goatlover »

seydor wrote: post #161

but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that peop…

> not something that gives us the books to find the answers

And what if you want more than the generic summary answer? You could keep asking questions, but at some point, you might not know what to ask or what the alternative answers might be, particularly on a controversial topic, or one where the answer isn't fully known. And there could be lots of reasons you might want to visit a site over just getting an answer. If search is replaced, something else needs to link to those sites. Maybe I'd rather watch a video, look at videos, or find a discussion.

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

#306

Post by snidane »

mrtksn wrote: post #205
pixl97 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages I mean that died decades ago when spammers just made pages with your word repeated over and over again. Spam makes everything worse.

Completely agree. I wish Google was able to fix spam instead of trying to be something else than a search engine. The cynic in me thinks that Google is doing it because it’s more profitable. If the results are crap, maybe ads are a better content? it’s not like you are going to use Bing?

Google made terrible mistakes with their main cash cow of search.

They removed the important feature to search only forums, ie. human generated content, and promoted SEO spam to the top instead. Public forums became undiscoverable and people moved to walled gardens of facebook and similar instead.

Then Google killed the search by trying to make it some AI answering robot. Now they ignore what you even ask it and just return to you what they think you'd want.

All that people were asking for was a better search engine and all we got was an inferior version of a chat bot.

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

#307

Post by krainboltgreene »

jamesrom wrote: post #282
lukeplato wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT hallucinates facts fairly consistently if the prompt is not worded correctly. IMO the prime benefit of search engines over LLM is the ability to provide validated information and opinions that are directly cited to experts. This is unlikely achievable in a differential landscape, so LLM are useful but will probably be best used in combination with standard search engines.

Let's check back on this in a few years. The idea that a search engine can cite experts but a LLM cannot sounds wrong to me.

If that's how you feel then maybe you need to re-evaluate what an LLM does.

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

#308

Post by goatlover »

dustincoates wrote: post #145
varunkmohan wrote: post #99

This feels like what a company that hasn't accepted the future would say. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't do exactly what Google does. Can it be augmented by well understood search retrieval engines to generate a much better response? I think for a lot of cases that seems to be undoubtedly true.

I'm (the author) actually in agreement with you. LLMs are going to be a big part of search in the future. I alluded to that I'm the post. I'm less convinced about search as a chat interface. But LLMs for query understanding, ranking, etc.? Of course.

How do you see LLMs handling the constant flow of new data, given spam, SEO hacking, fake news and what not? Can the training be reliably automated and performed that quickly? It seems the chatGPT folks are allowing free access so they can test and fix abuses with human intervention. But that's hard to do in real time.

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

#309

Post by tester457 »

lamontcg wrote: post #206
throwawaymaths wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT struggled to tell me how to pin the bottom of a div to the bottom of its parent when scrolling (like a chat window does). It gave me the first thing that I tried (which is wrong). Eventually I figured it out, then confronted ChatGPT about it and it insisted on the wrong answer, and blithely dismissed the correct answer.

I've been trying to get ChatGPT to solve pretty basic calculus questions and it is often either totally wrong or wrong in some tiny detail. I got into an argument over dimensional analysis a few weeks ago where it felt like it was gaslighting me.

I like chatgpt for programming but I don't like the sound of using a language model for math. I rather use Wolfram alpha

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

#310

Post by binkHN »

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…

> 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...

Agreed, it's horrible and annoying. How are others doing improved searches?

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