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AI assisted search-based research works now

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#41

Post by softwaredoug »

I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results. I often want to ask the AI Overview follow up questions.

I secondarily wonder how an LLM solves the trust problem in Web search. What's traditionally solved (and now gamed) through PageRank. It doesn't seem ChatGPT is easily fooled by Spam as direct search.

How much is Bing (or whatever the search engine is) getting better? vs how much are LLMs better at knowing what a good result is for a query?

Or perhaps it has to do with the richer questions that get asked to chat vs search?

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#42

Post by vunderba »

softwaredoug wrote: post #41

I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results. I often want to ask the AI Overview follow up questions. I secondarily wonder how an LLM solves the trust problem in Web search. What's traditionally solved (and now gamed) through PageRank. It doesn't seem ChatGPT is easily fooled by Spam as direct search. How much is Bing (or whatever the search engine is) getting better? vs how much are LLMs b…

> I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results.

You don't hear a lot of buzz around them, but thats kind of what Perplexity lets you do. (Possibly phind too but it's been a while since I used them).

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#43

Post by dingnuts »

softwaredoug wrote: post #41

I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results. I often want to ask the AI Overview follow up questions. I secondarily wonder how an LLM solves the trust problem in Web search. What's traditionally solved (and now gamed) through PageRank. It doesn't seem ChatGPT is easily fooled by Spam as direct search. How much is Bing (or whatever the search engine is) getting better? vs how much are LLMs b…

>I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results

Kagi has this already, it's great. Choose a result, click the three-dot menu, choose "Ask questions about this page." I love to do this with hosted man pages to discover ways to combine the available flags (and to discover what is there)

I find most code LLMs write to be subpar but Kagi can definitely write a better ffmpeg line than I can when I use this approach

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#44

Post by temp20250421 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #41

I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results. I often want to ask the AI Overview follow up questions. I secondarily wonder how an LLM solves the trust problem in Web search. What's traditionally solved (and now gamed) through PageRank. It doesn't seem ChatGPT is easily fooled by Spam as direct search. How much is Bing (or whatever the search engine is) getting better? vs how much are LLMs b…

[dead]

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#45

Post by KTibow »

softwaredoug wrote: post #41

I wonder when Google search will let me "chat" with the search results. I often want to ask the AI Overview follow up questions. I secondarily wonder how an LLM solves the trust problem in Web search. What's traditionally solved (and now gamed) through PageRank. It doesn't seem ChatGPT is easily fooled by Spam as direct search. How much is Bing (or whatever the search engine is) getting better? vs how much are LLMs b…

When AI Overview was called Search Generative Experience, you could do that. You can do that again now if you have access to AI Mode.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#46

Post by AlotOfReading »

sshine wrote: post #32
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully expect one of the AI-related business models going forward to be charging subscriptions for LLM search tool access to those kinds of archives. ChatGPT plus an extra $30/month for search access to a specific archive would make sense to me.

Kagi is $10/mo. for search and +$15/mo. for premium LLMs with agentic access to search.

What they're talking about is access to professional archives like EBSCOnet or Bloomberg, which usually don't sell to individuals in the first place and start at tens of thousands of dollars per seat for institutional access.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#47

Post by hadlock »

jsemrau wrote: post #3

My main observation here is 1. Technically it might be possible to search the Internet, but it might not surface correct and/or useful information. 2. High-value information that would make a research report valuable is rarely public nor free. This holds especially true in capital-intensive or regulated industries.

o3/o4 seem to know how to search things like pypi, crates.io, pkg.go.dev etc and apply those changes on the first try. My application (running on an older version of code) had a breaking change to how the event controller functioned in the newer version, o3 looked at the documentation and rewrote it to use the new event controller. It used to be that you were trapped with the LLM being 3-8 months behind on package versions.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#48

Post by TrackerFF »

jsemrau wrote: post #3

My main observation here is 1. Technically it might be possible to search the Internet, but it might not surface correct and/or useful information. 2. High-value information that would make a research report valuable is rarely public nor free. This holds especially true in capital-intensive or regulated industries.

I'm not a researcher, but don't most researchers these days also upload their work to arXiv?

Sure, it's not a journal - but in some fields (Machine Learning, Math) it seems like everyone also uploads their stuff there. So if the models can crawls sites like arXiv, at least there's some decent stuff to be found.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#49

Post by simonw »

hadlock wrote: post #47
jsemrau wrote: post #3

My main observation here is 1. Technically it might be possible to search the Internet, but it might not surface correct and/or useful information. 2. High-value information that would make a research report valuable is rarely public nor free. This holds especially true in capital-intensive or regulated industries.

o3/o4 seem to know how to search things like pypi, crates.io, pkg.go.dev etc and apply those changes on the first try. My application (running on an older version of code) had a breaking change to how the event controller functioned in the newer version, o3 looked at the documentation and rewrote it to use the new event controller. It used to be that you were trapped with the LLM being 3-8 months behind on package ve…

Huh, now I'm thinking that maybe a target for release notes should be to provide enough details that a good LLM can be used to apply fixes for any breaking changes.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#50

Post by das_keyboard »

esafak wrote: post #39
oulipo wrote: post #20

The main "real-world" use cases for AI use for now have been: - shooting buildings in Gaza https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-ai-weapons-43... - compiling a list of information on Government workers in US https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-doge-usi... - creating a few losy music videos I'd argue we'd be better off SLOWING DOWN with that shit

Programming is not real world?

Yeah right. We also got "vibe coding" out of it.
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