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Is AI the solution to search's problem?

lucaserb.substack.com

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Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#11

Post by drpixie »

baxtr wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m an outliner. But I’m not buying it. To me, it misses to analyze and address a fundamental problem of why google “got so bad”. I believe this is mainly a problem of the top 5%. There is reason why google presents their results like they do. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots not knowing their craft. Yes, for those of use around the internet since 1996, the results got worse. But since then the entire po…

Agree. But not sure what you mean by the "top 5%".

Google have deliberately stopped trying to provide an index of the web. They now focus solely on revenue (advertising) maximization. A search will show paid sites, then popular sites, up to a few pages, and that's it. For example, search for "brioche buns" - you can't convince me that there are only 420 pages in the entire www that refer to "brioche buns" :(

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#12

Post by friend_and_foe »

baxtr wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m an outliner. But I’m not buying it. To me, it misses to analyze and address a fundamental problem of why google “got so bad”. I believe this is mainly a problem of the top 5%. There is reason why google presents their results like they do. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots not knowing their craft. Yes, for those of use around the internet since 1996, the results got worse. But since then the entire po…

I'm not buying this explanation.

Google isn't delivering information based on what's relevant to users, Google is funneling you into their business: to funnel you into someone else's business. And they're doing it not by being very useful, but by being the default you reach for on every product you buy. To set up your life to not use google is a big hassle, I can safely say this because I've done it.

This is not simply an issue of "your needs are simply more advanced than normies", this is an issue of "indexing the internet doesnt work, we can't win the cat and mouse game of SEO, so we will just ensure a userbase by controlling the environment around everyone." Sprinkle in a little bit of gaslighting and information control and you've got the current state of affairs with regard to internet search.

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#14

Post by charcircuit »

drpixie wrote: post #11
baxtr wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m an outliner. But I’m not buying it. To me, it misses to analyze and address a fundamental problem of why google “got so bad”. I believe this is mainly a problem of the top 5%. There is reason why google presents their results like they do. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots not knowing their craft. Yes, for those of use around the internet since 1996, the results got worse. But since then the entire po…

Agree. But not sure what you mean by the "top 5%". Google have deliberately stopped trying to provide an index of the web. They now focus solely on revenue (advertising) maximization. A search will show paid sites, then popular sites, up to a few pages, and that's it. For example, search for "brioche buns" - you can't convince me that there are only 420 pages in the entire www that refer to "brioche buns" :(

>About 11,300,000 results

I get a lot more than 400.

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#15

Post by danbulant »

This solves the problem of pages full of ads and keywords and irrelevant content. It doesn't solve the problem that's talked about in the article - there are other solutions, usually alternative search engines (kagi[0], or if more AI=more better, the kagi labs with contextual answers with sources[1]. Not sponsored, just like using them. Similar service offered by Hey.com, but I didn't try them much).

[0]: https://kagi.com [1]: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#16

Post by looseyesterday »

AI is not the solution. The root issue here is Goodheart's law. SEO marketers are hacking rankings with mediocre content, this leads to lower returns on time invested for generating valuable content, so writers / creators divert their attention elsewhere. Kagi.ai is a good example of how google could be fixed.

Generative models dont know what they dont know, they will always struggle on new topics and worse still they wont provide feedback to the user to adjust their query as they will simply hallucinate details

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#17

Post by Falkon1313 »

drpixie wrote: post #11
baxtr wrote: post #6

Maybe I’m an outliner. But I’m not buying it. To me, it misses to analyze and address a fundamental problem of why google “got so bad”. I believe this is mainly a problem of the top 5%. There is reason why google presents their results like they do. It’s not like they’re a bunch of idiots not knowing their craft. Yes, for those of use around the internet since 1996, the results got worse. But since then the entire po…

Agree. But not sure what you mean by the "top 5%". Google have deliberately stopped trying to provide an index of the web. They now focus solely on revenue (advertising) maximization. A search will show paid sites, then popular sites, up to a few pages, and that's it. For example, search for "brioche buns" - you can't convince me that there are only 420 pages in the entire www that refer to "brioche buns" :(

It seems if a site is not selling something, and/or buying ads, and isn't in the most popular social media sites, Google just dumps it into the "No one knows what lies beyond this border" bin. Tons of forums, blogs, personal and informational sites, etc., all hidden somewhere in the fog beyond the 'edge of the world' and 'here be dragons' signs.

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#18

Post by AussieWog93 »

Anecdotally, I've been using ChatGPT to do the legwork of copying-and-pasting from Stack Overflow, and it's honestly really quite good. Have asked it to write maybe a dozen programs, even asked it why a particular line of code won't compile, and it does a really good job of explaining how things work.

Re: Is AI the solution to search's problem?

#19

Post by Barrin92 »

No. Generative AI at least won't. ChatGPT is Borges Library of Babel, it produces any reasonably sounding sentence in existence if you ask it to, of course useful information by definition is somehow in there but so is everything else. If your problem is that too much crap is on the internet, well that crap is in ChatGPT, and then some.

Even if you only get fiction 20% of the time that's still absolute poison for a search engine that sounds completely authoritative. It's like having sand on your toothbrush.

The solution to abundance of bad info on the internet are two things. One, rudimentary search engine skills, i.e. filtering by source, keyword search and some basic literacy because all the good sources are still there and growing. Secondly, trusted sources curated by people that you have confidence in to produce high quality output.

The discourse increasingly reminds me of Alexa/"smart" home assistants which people thought would replace everything because the natural language interaction seems futuristic.

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