11–20 of 346 posts
People used to spend money on books and magazines, I'm sure some of them could be convinced to sign up for a Netflix of books and magazines.
There's a very strong financial incentive for ad-powered search engines to keep SEO spam out of search results, because that makes advertisers more willing to pay for search placement. A publicly run search engine would not have those incentives and would be at if anything graver risk of a "tragedy of the commons" type scenario where the engine is overtaken with spam.
Yes, there are perverse incentives to populate search engine results with paid placements, but the best corrective force I can think of is having more competition in the search space. As long as people are willing to try other search engines (spoiler: for the most part, they are currently not), this creates a strong incentive to ensure that paid placements that harm the search experience are kept to a minimum.
...and I think the concerns about profitability of the LLM space is completely missing the larger agenda. Even if public use of OpenAI and its competitors NEVER TURNS A PROFIT, there is tremendous economic opportunity that investors expect to realize from a company with intelligent/powerful LLMs. That is why they are pumping so much money into these companies.
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
The web is in such a bad state, I think there is probably an opportunity for traditional publishers (or somebody else, like a university) to start a walled garden web. A vast trove of interesting, and valuable information on every topic. No shopping, no ads. Just the content you would find in the library. People used to spend money on books and magazines, I'm sure some of them could be convinced to sign up for a Netf…
Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your search-enabled LLM queries.
I am not affiliated with Kagi or anything, it's just honestly that good a product.
I am deliberately keeping away from LLMs for search. I'm old enough to remember finally ditching Altavista for the new upstart Google. I did briefly flirt with Ask Jeeves but it was not good enough. I don't think anyone has it sorted yet. LLM search will always be flawed due to being a next token guesser - it cannot be trusted for "facts". A LLM fact is not even a considered opinion, it is simply next token guessing.…
I miss Altavista every day. Case-sensitive search is how you tell DOS from DoS. Putting "exact phrases" in quotes no longer seems to work. Then they added insult to injury by forcing you to +mandate a term otherwise they might just ignore it. Now that no longer works either. I've entirely given up on Google. I've made extensive shortcuts so I can directly search various sites straight from my location bar: wikipedia,…
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
> These days, I find that I am using multiple search engines and often resort to using an LLM to help me find content. For a few months, I've been wondering: how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data? It's trivial to add prompts encouraging product placement, but I would be completely shocked if the big players don't sell out within a year or two, and start biasing the models themse…
I can absolutely assure you that SEO companies are already marketing AI strategies oriented around making content easily and preferentially consumable by LLMs and their vendors.
The author would do well to check out Kagi -- the search results for all of the suggested queries are, to my eye, better than the results they found. Given that Kagi's higher tier plans come with search-enabled LLM chat interfaces, and those searches use Kagi's results (which, again, appear to be superior) it seems to me that you get the best of both worlds: Better search, and better search results to feed into your…
Yet. It's only a matter of time before AI becomes ad-riddled and enshittified.