Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

trellner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 265 posts

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#21

Post by Wowfunhappy »

xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

> I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful.

Interesting. For me I've noticed it tends to do the opposite.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#23

Post by DarmokTanagra »

xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

If that were true I would expect to see prose that more closely resembles the "caveman" messages found in the HuggingFace attack than the overly flowery nonsense we see in AI blogspam.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#24

Post by pietz »

The irony of this article being fully AI generated...

Anyway, it's over for Perplexity. They never had a great a product and the only reason for using them, was when they offered Pro accounts for free. Many people joined. Me included. But with a "meh" product and the general AI business not being very sticky, they lost quite harshly.

I thought they might be able to make money as a search api/index, but this article closed the book.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#25

Post by stranded22 »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…

I paid for perplexity pro for 3 years. I genuinely enjoyed using it and felt it was better overall than ChatGPT etc due to the way it showed sources etc. I liked being able to use different models depending on what I was looking for, and the deep research was helpful.

I think they probably damaged themselves by going for a land grab of user base through freebies. It meant the users weren’t ever going to convert to paid customers, so it was more to show investors that they had a user base. But, with an increased base of users who weren’t paying, it then meant they needed to find either new revenue streams or cheaper ways to provide the service. Unfortunately, it seems they went with the new revenue streams whilst also decreasing the functions paying members were able to access (something I find quite abhorrent- I paid a service level, but then they change what I receive mid-subscription). And then computer - rammed down my throat. One reason I pay for pro is to stop the nagging noise of paid tiers. And instead, they actually created a way of logging in and continually seeing gated functions.

So, after paying them upwards of $400-$500 and being a loyal customer, I walked.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#27

Post by coldpie »

sph wrote: post #2

What protection do LLM search engines have against training off content generated by other LLMs? Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet, and LLMs are training upon their own regurgitations, with exponential amplification of all their lies and flaws? Or will the pre-2022 corpus human knowledge be considered the low-background steel standard, and anything after that less and…

I've mostly stopped using the Internet to learn new things and have gone back to books from the library. The majority of technical books at the library were published pre-2020s and hopefully, publishing slop physically won't be profitable enough to flood that market, too. Now that the Internet has largely been destroyed by slop manufacturers, whether or not the words are(/were) worth putting on paper becomes a useful discriminator.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#28

Post by jasonjmcghee »

xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

If by root urls you mean domains, openai at least supports this.

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-web-sear...

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#29

Post by cheesecakegood »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…

I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.
Post reply on HN