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Generative AI could make search harder to trust

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Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#81

Post by interstice »

icyberbullyu wrote: post #63
abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.

If someone brought back a search engine like this i'd happily use it

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#83

Post by hashtag-til »

heavyset_go wrote: post #43
BitwiseFool wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.

Can't prove it, but it seems to me like black text on white background sites from the past are poorly ranked compared to sites with "modern" layouts.

Yes. I love black text on white background. A rare find these days.

Browsing today is like: “You ask for a spaghetti recipe and the page tell you the whole history of civilization.”

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#84

Post by gyudin »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #57
ryanklee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are vastly everestimating how unique this problem of hallucinations is. It seems to me it relies mostly on discounting just how much we've already had to deal with this same problem in humans over the millenia. The problem of proliferation of bad information might be getting worse, but this isn't native to generative AI. The entire informational ecosystem has to deal with this. GPTs compound the issue, but as…

The thing is when you call a human on bullshit, they usually can't back it up well enough to pass the smell test. When you call an AI on bullshit it can instantly fabricate plausible, credible seeming sources/evidence. A human's lie is different than an AI's hallucination, since it's still based on (distorting) the truth, whereas the hallucination is based on an invented reality (yes I know it's applied statistics an…

It’s not a big deal, there are many ways to handle it. It just has some overhead costs. LLMs that are offered to general public are more of a POC and they are making sure to use as little resources as possible.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#85

Post by saalweachter »

klyrs wrote: post #72
icyberbullyu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been using search engines since the 90's, I've found that the "old-school" way of formatting your search almost like a database query has gotten significantly worse. It seems like search engines are geared more towards natural language queries now; probably because the old Google-Fu way of doing things wasn't very friendly for people who didn't use computers regularly.

My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic similarity. Notably, you can no longer put a sentence in quotes to only find pages that contain that exact phrase. Also, the order of words matters more now than it used to (where the old search engines treated a space as AND, so order was irrelevant outside of q…

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+no+longer+put+a+s...

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#86

Post by dredmorbius »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #61
dredmorbius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate. At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine. Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.

The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.

~/name at an edu is pretty attainable.

.edu domains can be had for any otherwise eligible "U.S.-based postsecondary institutions" per Educause: https://net.educause.edu/eligibility.htm>

Pages at extant domains might variously be available to undergraduate or graduate students, faculty, staff, and adjuncts. Those might either directly host emulative material or be convinced or compromised into hosting content.

If there's one thing that the Internet's history to date has proved, its that perverse incentives lead to perverse consequences.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#87

Post by hashtag-til »

lykahb wrote: post #64

The SEO garbage has been poisoning the search for years. Even before the chatbots it got to the point when most top results are crap. The LLM's can surely make it much worse, though.

I think this is a given these days. LLMs likely will become the new single point of failure search.

This is too much of a temptation for the SEO scum to resist.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#88

Post by zeroonetwothree »

hashtag-til wrote: post #83
heavyset_go wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't prove it, but it seems to me like black text on white background sites from the past are poorly ranked compared to sites with "modern" layouts.

Yes. I love black text on white background. A rare find these days. Browsing today is like: “You ask for a spaghetti recipe and the page tell you the whole history of civilization.”

Thats specific to recipes because they can’t be copyrighted

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#89

Post by ryandrake »

meowface wrote: post #68
abruzzi wrote: post #31

I have to say--the opening paragraph doesn't describe a reality I'm familiar with: >Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results. Web search has, f…

I've had the exact same experience. That said, when I do add all the right quotes and conditions to the query to filter out the blog/newsspam drivel, I still - usually - eventually - get pretty good results. Sometimes I have to switch to Bing or even Yandex, but it's rare. Adding "reddit" to queries can be pretty useful. You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet…

> You're prone to get terrible, inaccurate information since it's just random people on an internet forum, but at least it's (usually) actual humans and not blogs trying to SEO-game.

Less and less so. Reddit has always had a bot problem, but it seems to be getting exponentially worse lately. Not just article reposters, but comment reposters, bots that reverse images and videos just to repost, seems like it's at least 75% bot content now.

Re: Generative AI could make search harder to trust

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

notahacker wrote: post #58
dredmorbius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the xkcd interpretation more realistic: https://xkcd.com/635/ > Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/635:_Locke_and_De... >

I love that interpretation, but in today's retweet driven world of politically commentary, I actually find it quite plausible that pseudonymous kids with no grasp of the real world who think rational political debate is the nonsensical slogans they're spouting on the internet become major Twitter influencers that actual politicians want to court for their "authenticity" and "willingness to say the unsayable", and may…

The conceit of Ender's Game was that thoughtful discourse would be influential online.

Reality has largely demonstrated that far more thoughtless propaganda of the Big Lie, Firehose of Bullshit (or Falsehood), associated with Russia, floods of irrelevance which tend to bury more significant stories, favoured by China, and outrage / hot-button topics, which are common in US-centric media, though a timeless technique.

Memes and simple messages attract attention and spread. Complex narratives and analyses ... not so much.

But yes, voices that deserve no attention whatsover have dominated the media landscape of the past decade or so. Not that this is entirely novel.

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