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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

#391

Post by uconnectlol »

thegabriele wrote: post #389
uconnectlol wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all I remember is one scene where a bunch of cop cars or vans get dispatched for some reason like someone's about to die or a heist is happening, something of that nature. They all crash and roll over and wipe out on normal traffic roads for absolutely no reason, and the movie isn't even a comedy, just a generic action movie. I can't remember one single thing other thing about it, not even the plot. I do re…

A movie where police cars crash without any reason and it's not even a comedy, it's in the range of Steven Segal body of work

It was a normal Hollywood movie as far as I could tell. I would have noticed if it was a Steven Segal movie.

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

#392

Post by davidmurdoch »

viraptor wrote: post #350
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…

> With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. This is a killer feature and I don't understand why ddg and Google don't do it. Google doesn't even have to respect that list for ads. Just give me a way to remove all results from domain X, Y and Z. There are already extensions which do that, but I can't use them on my mobile. It would improve my Google satisfaction massively since it's normally th…

Blocking domains used to be built in to Google Search.

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

#393

Post by acdha »

pixl97 wrote: post #200
mrtksn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I wouldn't go long on search engines that don't have a strong ML component to them in the future. Arguably, it's the ML that made Google useless for some people. Since some time, Google seems to be curating it's results to address searches in a question format. In the past we were searching for occurrences of our keywords in webpages but today Google seems to be trying to be an answer machine. Unfortuna…

>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.

Only for the most simplistic implementations. More advanced implementations and incorporating page reputation took care of that pretty well for many years — Google’s quality decline started some time after they merged with Doubleclick in 2008 (notice how they haven’t done much innovative since?), and started allowing abusive sites like Quora or Pinterest to bypass policies against things like search cloaking, presumably due to things like large Ad Words purchases. All of the scam domains I see outranking legitimate results have tons and tons of ad impressions for Google.

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

#394

Post by acdha »

uconnectlol wrote: post #114
Waterluvian wrote: post #57

I remember when web search engines were new. And boy did they suck. You wouldn’t get what you wanted a lot of the time, and they were very finicky about the input query. These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house” I’m not sure ChatGPT is going to replace search engines, but I’m confident that it is incredibly young and will evolve c…

In 2001-2003, browsers crashed every 5 minutes then and Google's search didn't crash nor freeze nor slow it due to not being covered in ads and popups (having only 1-3 ad results at the top of the page with green text was a massive improvement). On tech forums back then, people would say, "is this even sustainable?" Microsoft search and the other ones were just "there was an attempt" tier and gave complete nonsense r…

This point would be better without such extreme hyperbole. Google search was an improvement but it’s not like using AltaVista was that bad - many of the advanced search operators you mentioned got started there.

Crashes were also far less common than you’re describing - that got worse in the 2000s when Flash became ubiquitous.

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

#395

Post by Denzel »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #388
Denzel wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality doesn’t lend support toward your arguments. I assume you’re from a first-world country, based upon your comment. - Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.) - 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web. How much would Google have to charge to break even? $250B/yr / 4B people = $62.5/yr/person = $5/month/person What does the world income distributi…

First if all, thanks for that argument, haven’t considered the math in this perspective before. Will need to let this simmer a bit. One immediate flaw though, you starting premise is that the current revenue is needed to break even on such a service. Is there an argument to support this claim as well?

I’d call it an assumption, not so much a flaw. :) We can make other assumptions.

To break even, Google would at least need to cover their expenses. Google had $200B in expenses for 2022, with a net profit of $50B. So, that won’t really change the math.

Especially when we consider the fact that the take-rate would be much less than 100%. Maybe 5-10% is a fair take-rate assumption? (Seems fair since YouTube has roughly 50M paid subscribers on 1B MAUs, 5%, from the public data I’m seeing.)

At 5-10% take-rate, the service would cost 10-20x more to break even ($50-$100/month on average) which would be a nonstarter for the global middle class and lower.

One could make the argument then for Google to lower its costs in an effort to lower the consumer’s price, but then we must realize this runs opposite of innovation. Investment is necessary for innovation, and profits are necessary for investment. Without profits, there’s no more innovation.

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

#396

Post by amai »

ChatGPT will make search engines useless. But not by replacing them. It will produce so much and so high quality SEO spam websites, that you won‘t find any real content anymore. It will increase the noise level in the internet so much, that automatically finding a signal with search engines will not work anymore. We will be back to manually curated lists of webpages as in the good old days of Yahoo.

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

#398

Post by chiefalchemist »

nowherebeen wrote: post #365
chiefalchemist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which will ultimately drive more people directly to ChatGPT and just cut out the search middle-person.

Not necessary. The google search function still works fine, its just the content becomes worst. If the content is generated from ChatGPT, I don't see how it will cut out the middle-person. I believe a more likely scenario is people appending site:reddit.com for all of their search. It will be domain specific.

Eventually, the masses will understand that 75%+ on the first SERP page are AI sourced. Why bother with the middle if it adds too little value?

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

#399

Post by uconnectlol »

acdha wrote: post #394
uconnectlol wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2001-2003, browsers crashed every 5 minutes then and Google's search didn't crash nor freeze nor slow it due to not being covered in ads and popups (having only 1-3 ad results at the top of the page with green text was a massive improvement). On tech forums back then, people would say, "is this even sustainable?" Microsoft search and the other ones were just "there was an attempt" tier and gave complete nonsense r…

This point would be better without such extreme hyperbole. Google search was an improvement but it’s not like using AltaVista was that bad - many of the advanced search operators you mentioned got started there. Crashes were also far less common than you’re describing - that got worse in the 2000s when Flash became ubiquitous.

I do remember constantly hearing that Alta Vista was good but I think I only used Microsoft and Yahoo (I forget what else there was). Nope, crashes were definitely common. Browser quality until around 2010 or so was absolutely horrible. Firefox was another case like Google where it debuted around 2000-2003 and everyone immediately switched to it because it was a massive improvement over IE which barely functioned at all. It still wasn't good, just better than the other crap. The types of bugs in Firefox back in 2003 are absolutely embarrassing by even the common software engineer's standards today. Then of course Firefox just grew in bloat at the same time as it grew in amount of people to fix its problems and now we have a different kind of crap.
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