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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#311

Post by Lerc »

niam wrote: post #142

Genuine question: is there a present or planned value proposition for people like me who already have decent search skills? Or are these really for children/elders who (without making any normative claim about whether this is a good thing or not) can't be arsed to perform searches themselves? Does someone else have good search skills but mingle traditional search engines with LLMs anyways? Why? I use LLMs every day b…

I think the skills required will change but more in an adaptation way rather than everything-you-knew-is-now-irrelevant.

I feel like there is a mental architecture to searching where you try and isolate aspects of what you are searching for that are distinct within the broad category of similar but irrelevant things. That kind of mental model I would hope still works well.

For instance consider this query.

"Which clothing outlets on AliExpress are most recommended in forum discussions for providing high quality cloths, favour discussions where there is active engagement between multiple people."

OpenAI search produces a list of candidate stores from this query. Are the results any good? It's going to be quite hard to tell for a while. I know searching for information like this on Google is close to worthless due to SEO pollution.

It's possible that we have at least a brief golden-age of search where the rules have changed sufficiently that attempts to game the system are mitigated. It will be a hard fought battle to see if AI Search can filter out people trying to game AI search.

I think we will need laws to say AI advice should be subject to similar constraints as legal, medical, and financial advice where there is an obligation to act in the interests of the person being advised. I don't want to have AI search delivering the results of the highest bidder.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#312

Post by jerjerjer »

notatoad wrote: post #210
blixt wrote: post #108

One thing that is quite unfortunate with the state of SEO and the web in general today is that when I asked "what are the latest versions of common programming languages and when were they released?" a large amount of the sources were "13 Tools You Should Learn Now" and the like. This might be a solvable problem within the search API they provide to the LLM, but for now I wouldn't trust current LLMs to be able to fil…

>what are the latest versions of common programming languages and when were they released? is this a real question you needed an answer to, or a hypothetical you posed to test the quality of search results? of course you're going to get listicles for a query like that, because it sounds like a query specifically chosen to find low-quality listicles.

I honestly doubt there exist an actual reputable resource having it on a same page. Each language tracks their own latest version(s). Wikipedia tracks latest versions for a variety of software but it's on different pages.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#315

Post by mgh2 »

wvenable wrote: post #286
freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

> Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? I think it's already compelling enough to replace the current paradigm. Search is pretty much dead to me. I have to end every search with "reddit" to get remotely useful results. The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetize…

Also, energy use: 10x as much as a Google search https://www.rwdigital.ca/blog/how-much-energy-do-google-sear....

Re: ChatGPT Search

#316

Post by modeless »

marckrn wrote: post #295

OpenAI also provides a Chrome Extension ( https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-search/ejcf... ) to trigger a search from the omnibar as the default search engine. If you don't like that (like I do), you can also manually add it under Site Search using https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&hints=search

First impression: Far too slow to replace Google Search for this use. I frequently get 5+ seconds of waiting before the first word of a response shows up, vs. less than 1 for Google (which is not as fast as it used to be). OpenAI has a lot of work to do on latency.

I can definitely see this new search feature being useful though. The old one was already useful because (if you asked) you could have it visit each result and pull some data out for you and integrate it all together, faster than you could do the same manually.

It's often hobbled by robots.txt forbidding it to visit pages, though. What I really want is for it to use my browser to visit the pages instead of doing it server side, so it can use my logged-in accounts and ignore robots.txt.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#317

Post by thund »

pradn wrote: post #221
101008 wrote: post #156

Search in the internet worked because people wanted to generate content to attract people to display ads or any other reason, but they wanted to attract people. If now my content is going to be ingested and shown by a LLM or AI agent, what's the purpose to give it for free? I know it won't happen, but I would love if this type of agents have to pay to show a summarization of another website. It's only fair when done…

Well the whole point of this product is to link back to websites. There’s no necessary link between the text and the links, which are chosen after the fact from an index. That’s different from traditional search engines, where links are directly retrieved from the index as part of ranking.

The answer though has so much info already that it reduces the need to visit the links.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#318

Post by jay_kyburz »

cmiles74 wrote: post #291
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. This also seems like a little ridiculous premise. Any confident statement about the real world is never fully reliable. If star trek were realistic the computer would have been wrong once in a while (preferably with dramatically disastrous consequences)—just as the humans it likely was built aro…

This feels like hyperbole to me. People can reasonably expect Wikipedia to have factual data even though it sometimes contains inaccuracies. Likewise if people are using ChatGPT for search it should be somewhat reliable. If I'm asking ChatGPT to put an itinerary together for a trip (OpenAI's suggestion, not mine), my expectation is that places on that itinerary exist. I can forgive them being closed or even out of bu…

>People can reasonably expect Wikipedia to have factual data even though it sometimes contains inaccuracies.

It drives me crazy that my kids teachers go on and on about how inaccurate Wikipedia is, and that just anybody can update the articles. They want to teach the kids to go to the library and search books.

In a few years time they will be going on and on about how inaccurate ChatGippity is and that they should use Wikipedia.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#319

Post by amiantos »

101008 wrote: post #156

Search in the internet worked because people wanted to generate content to attract people to display ads or any other reason, but they wanted to attract people. If now my content is going to be ingested and shown by a LLM or AI agent, what's the purpose to give it for free? I know it won't happen, but I would love if this type of agents have to pay to show a summarization of another website. It's only fair when done…

I publish my content "for free" because I want to spread knowledge and information, or promote a topic or interest I enjoy, and monetization has never been a priority for me. I know that I am not alone. The urge to create does not depend on a need for money. I am happy for my websites to be picked up by Perplexity or ChatGPT because I want more people to see/learn/hear about the things I care about.

If someone only creates for money, only publishes on the web to get people to look at advertisements, well... I think there are plenty of other people who don't feel that way that will fill the void left behind in their departure.

To me it seems weird so many people think the internet only exists because advertising props it up. The internet existed and was a wonderful place before advertising became widespread, and most services and websites will continue to exist after advertising is gone (if that ever happens). What encourages people to believe in some sort of great collapse?

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