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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#701

Phind kinda-sorta did this. For awhile I used it as my primary search, but limitations made me go back to Google. Hopefully ChatGPT's version works very well. Phind was more of a kludge to demonstrate what combining chat AI and search can do.

We're working on a complete redesign of Phind to make it more of a search competitor :) What were the limitations you ran into?

I was a paying customer for around 6 months. Perplexity's UI was better for finding sources and their model prompts and settings were better at proving summaries from pages at the time I left.

The one thing that kept me on Phind for a lot longer than I would have otherwise been was that I could pay for Claude usage when I over ran my daily quota. With Sonnet 3.5 there wasn't a point since I wasn't getting over the limits for Perplexity and you didn't provide a way to use an api key for Openai models at the time - to this day I find that GPT4 turbo is better than 4o for my use cases. This alone would have kept me around.

Since then Perplexity has gotten worse and they removed a lot of the old useful models. If you have something like poe.com where I can select the model to answer a query and give me fine grained control over the model settings I'd come back in a heart beat - e.g. if I'm doing research I don't know the answer to a high temperature is a good thing, if I want to find bugs in code a low one is better. My current killer feature is something like undermind where complex queries are run in the background and I get reports in due course by email.

Happy to chat more, my email is in my profile. I work in the space and have been building proprietary systems to help ground financial search for two years now.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#702
post #569
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me but I have no interest in having a computer algorithm interpret data for me. That's a job that I want to do myself .

Ranking the results is a prerequisite for any search engine, and that's interpretation, isn't it?

No, I wouldn't say that. I mean they could try to influence what sources I check first, but I'm the one doing the interpretation.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#703

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…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Search

#704

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…

I agree that this is the core question, but I'd put it as: Who Gets To Decide What Is True? With a search paradigm this wasn't an issue as much, because the answers were presented as "here's a bunch of websites that appear to deal with the question you asked". It was then up to the reader to decide which of those sites they wanted to visit, and therefore which viewpoints they got to see. With an LLM answering the que…

> An LLM trawling the web could very conceivably come up with a non-truthful answer.

LLMs don't uncritically "trawl" the web, ingesting and then blindly regurgitating what they find.

98% of the internet is crap, yet LLM results don't reflect this dismal figure. They're amazingly good at distilling the 2% that is non-crap.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#705
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g ), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your q…

Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless. Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a m…

I switched to DDG couple of years ago without knowing what to expect. Once I got used to their UI there was no turning back.

And on rare occasions now when I do search on Google I feel so happy I switched to DDG. To an extent that it does feel to me that Google has indeed stopped working completely for me. And yes I’ve stopped their search history, recommendations etc on YouTube.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#706

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…

Interesting, I hadn’t see the Knowledge Navigator before. I would argue that we’re very close to the capabilities shown in that video.

Isn’t this already that? A new business model? Something like OpenAI’s search or Perplexity can run on its own index and not be influenced by Google’s ranking, ads, etc.

In areas where there is a simple objective truth, like finding the offset for the wheels on a 2008 BMW M3, we have had this capability for some time with Perplexity. The LLMs successfully cuts through the sea of SEO/SEM and forum nonsense and delivers the answer.

In areas where the truth is more subjective, like what is the best biscuit restaurant in downtown Nashville, the system could easily learn your preferences and deliver info suited to your biases.

In areas where “the science” is debated, the LLM can show both sides.

I think this is the beginning of the new model.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#707

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…

The most rational incentive would seem to be a kind of toll extracted on the value of all you create where search contributed to that creation. So like every month, you get an invoice from the great search company in the cloud where somehow it’s objectively assessed how much search contributed to the value you created for the world that month - and then you pay that amount and all remains right with the world until the end of time.

In that way, search captures value directly on its core function: efficiently facilitating the creation and dispersal of knowledge.

This may end up occurring, but based on how unlikely it sounds, it’s my reflection that the web search that we have today is simply a small component of what will eventually become a system that closely approximates the above: basically a kind of global intelligent interconnected agent for the advancement of humanity.

Rather than the great unbundling, this will be the great rebundling … of many diverse functions into a single interface seamlessly.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#708

Every time I see one of these topics, I go ask chat GPT a question to which I know the answer on a topic where I would like to be able to get useful answers to similar questions that I do not know the answer to. This time it was, "Did Paul Edwin Zimmer write a fourth Dark Border novel?" (Real answer: Yes, Ingulf the Mad . You can find the answer on his Wikipedia page.[1]) ChatGPT's[2] answer: "Yes, Paul Edwin Zimmer…

If you don’t trust the answer I always tell it to look it up and it invariably gets it right

Re: ChatGPT Search

#709
I think for now, "search engine" has been fundamentally split into three categories

1. a "raw" news aggregator. LLM may not keep up to speed with latest news. We may still manually review real-world pictures, videos or texts, which might be too important to be mis-interpreted by a LLM. A first-hand source is essential

2. a grep tool. LLM can not provide precise match with 100% confidence, or stuff that might be missing or ignored by LLMs

3. a knowledgable place where you seek answers. LLM excels at this

Re: ChatGPT Search

#710
One time it cited something that looked like a ChatGPT-generated article as a source. That doesn't sound great.

But in other ways this looks like a great upgrade

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