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What we lost when search stopped making us think

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Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#31

Post by pjc50 »

xnorswap wrote: post #19
raincole wrote: post #10

I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better. There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.

Just this morning I had a worrying result when I googled "UV index " and it confidently told me the current UV index was zero. It was not, and at least because it was obviously wrong I clicked through to a page with the real UV index. But had it said "The UV index is 1.7" I might have believed it, but it'd still have been wrong, potentially dangerously so. Now to be clear, live data is precisely the sort of thing I e…

The worst example of this seems to be tide tables, which are extremely date-dependant.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#32

Post by bpodgursky »

5555watch wrote: post #28

I can't be the only one that scrolls past quickly the whatever Google-AI spurts out. If I wanted to ask an AI - I would. But I've learned that they hallucinate stuff with numbers or anything that's time sensitive/recent (even if that might not be the truth now). So I won't spend my time on verifying their output. I'm after a quick search, not a likely guess. What's worse, when reading the Google outputs, I have learn…

The last thing I searched Google for was "india gdp growth" and Google gave me an estimate for India's 2026 GDP growth. It took like 2 seconds. It's almost certainly basically correct.

If I had tried to find an authoritative source I might have spent a minute on it. Would it have killed me? No. Would I do that for something more life-threatening? Of course. But flash results are... fine, for 90% of what I search for.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#33

Post by keeda »

andai wrote: post #8

Has anyone tried making a p2p search engine? Naively it seems like one of the p2p networks from the late 90s or early 2000s should be able to handle it. Searches propagate between nodes, nodes specialize on specific sections of the index, which can be random + user preference (maximizing redundance and availability for the things people actually care about). Soulseek already gets like halfway there and it's not even…

So my MS research focused on P2P networks, and with the caveat that the area has been out of favor (and hence under-researched) for about 2 decades, I would say it would be extremely hard to build even decent quality search in a purely decentralized manner.

There were essentially two main ways of doing P2P search: flooding and Distributed Hash Tables (DHT). Flooding is exactly how it sounds: you flood a query across the whole network. The most popular applications like Limewire, Kazaa etc were flooding based, and as you can imagine, didn’t scale well. I recall some stories of havoc on networks due to the amount of traffic they generated. However they were simple and allowed somewhat complex queries, because each node basically ran a brute force search on its local index.

On the other hand, DHTs organize nodes in a distributed index structure such that queries can be routed in a deterministic manner, typically in O(logN) hops. DHTs were basically the granddaddies of distributed NoSQL DBs like DynamoDB and Cassandra.

So you can already see the limitations of DHTs: they need keys to be indexed, typically keywords. You had to pick a small handful of keywords for it to be manageable. This inherently limits the complexity and scale of the queries.

Both had an existential problem with spam. There were essentially no defenses against bad actors poisoning the network with spam and malware. It was a huge unsolved problem until Bitcoin popularized proof of work (which had been suggested in various forms before, but Bitcoin was the first practical, robust application.)

And neither could approach the sophistication of Google, which could extract very high quality signals from their centralized troves of data to refine and rank results.

Personally though I think the time is ripe for a renaissance. Spam and bad actors are still existential problems, but with vectors / embeddings the discovery aspect could be addressed. It occurs to me that the most popular large scale vector search mechanism is HNSW networks, which seem pretty amenable to P2P networks…

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#35

Post by chrisjj »

moooo99 wrote: post #18
raincole wrote: post #10

I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better. There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.

Interesting given this is the polar opposite of my experience. I find Googles AI overview to give wrong answers constantly. Occasionally, even for questions I believe Google circa 2018 was able to answer confidently. Ironically, Googles AI overview often links to references that state the polar opposite of what the AI overview claims.

Each Google "AI" response should state a correctness confidence value. A range 0-40% will probably suffice.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#36

Post by nosioptar »

andai wrote: post #8

Has anyone tried making a p2p search engine? Naively it seems like one of the p2p networks from the late 90s or early 2000s should be able to handle it. Searches propagate between nodes, nodes specialize on specific sections of the index, which can be random + user preference (maximizing redundance and availability for the things people actually care about). Soulseek already gets like halfway there and it's not even…

There's yacy. I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though.

https://yacy.net/

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#37

Post by gtowey »

xnorswap wrote: post #19
raincole wrote: post #10

I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better. There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.

Just this morning I had a worrying result when I googled "UV index " and it confidently told me the current UV index was zero. It was not, and at least because it was obviously wrong I clicked through to a page with the real UV index. But had it said "The UV index is 1.7" I might have believed it, but it'd still have been wrong, potentially dangerously so. Now to be clear, live data is precisely the sort of thing I e…

It's almost like what we really need is someone to simply index the sites that have the actual primary sources so we can search them and find them quickly! /s

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#38

Post by kg »

keybored wrote: post #29
bluefirebrand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm against them, vehemently, but I'm also not going to fight a tidal wave. I'm not going to be unemployed and unemployable by refusing to use them. Principles are expensive and I certainly cannot realistically afford to hold them tightly. Being forced to use them to continue to have an income is causing me a cognitive dissonance and a level of stress that is surely going to kill me though. I strongly resent the fact…

Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.

Even if it's not inevitable, if your employer tells you "use AI or get fired", well, take your pick. A lot of the resentment I see is a result of those sorts of mandates.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#39

Post by keybored »

kg wrote: post #38
keybored wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.

Even if it's not inevitable, if your employer tells you "use AI or get fired", well, take your pick. A lot of the resentment I see is a result of those sorts of mandates.

That’s why I don’t entertain their fatalism. We’re all rats on a sinking ship powerless to do anything outside of our existing schedules. Indistinguishable outcome for the majority of people compared to the AI euphorics.

Re: What we lost when search stopped making us think

#40

Post by wongarsu »

nosioptar wrote: post #36
andai wrote: post #8

Has anyone tried making a p2p search engine? Naively it seems like one of the p2p networks from the late 90s or early 2000s should be able to handle it. Searches propagate between nodes, nodes specialize on specific sections of the index, which can be random + user preference (maximizing redundance and availability for the things people actually care about). Soulseek already gets like halfway there and it's not even…

There's yacy. I didn't get useful results wheb I tested it though. https://yacy.net/

Back around 2008 it didn't give great results either. It's amazing how long the project manages to stay alive though
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