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Claude can now search the web

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude can now search the web

#121

Post by magackame »

tcdent wrote: post #102

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem. More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but inte…

Google search is crap. It seems to be a sentiment among many HNers, but is it really that bad? I mostly use it for programming, so documentation/forums and it works out greatly. For some queries it even returns personal blogs (which people seem to bash google for not happening). Of course there are some queries that return purely AI blogspam, but reformatting the query with a bit more thought usually solves it. I wonder if that is a US thing? Do search results differ greatly based on the region?

Re: Claude can now search the web

#122

Post by kelseyfrog »

tcdent wrote: post #102

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem. More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but inte…

Search engines now have an incentive to offer a B2B search product that solves the blogspam problem. Don't worry, the AIs will get good search results, and you'll still get the version that's SEOed to the point of uselessness.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#123

Post by beeflet »

elefanten wrote: post #106
darepublic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I expect eventually the agent will be able to act on your behalf with your credentials.

And as advertisers get declining human views on their ads, the value of the business model will dwindle until it needs to be replaced by other forms of revenue. Content that can't shift business models and requires revenue to continue will die off. Edit: Maybe that's fine, maybe that's bad. Maybe new models will emerge and things will reshape. But I'm just supporting the case that AI agents will pressure the current…

the free content economy is bogus, I am part of a growing segment of users that just block ads anyways.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#124

Post by HankWozHere »

tcdent wrote: post #102

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem. More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but inte…

Kagi Assistant allows you to do search with LLM queries. So far I feel it bears reliable results. For instance - I tried couple of queries for product suggestions and came back with some good results. Whilst it’s a premium service , I find the offering to be of good value.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#125

Post by yoyohello13 »

Almondsetat wrote: post #111
tcdent wrote: post #102

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem. More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but inte…

>looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer. LLMs are truly reaching human-like behavior then

The longer I've been in the workforce, the more I realize most humans actually kind of suck at their jobs. LLMs being more human like is the opposite of what I want.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#126

Post by beeflet »

mvdtnz wrote: post #68
_2d30 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it should. If a user asks the AI to read the web for them, it should read the web for them. This isn't a vacuum charged with crawling the web, it's an adhoc GET request.

No thank you, when I define a robots.txt file I expect all automated systems to respect it.

Someone should call the robots.txt police then, there's a bandit on the loose!

Re: Claude can now search the web

#127

Post by Aloisius »

mediumsmart wrote: post #44
Demiurge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what circles is it a joke? Google bots seem to respect it on my sites according to logs.

I know an artist that had noindex turned on by mistake in robots.txt for the last 5 years - google, kagi and duckduckgo find tons of links relevant to the artist and the artwork but not a single one from the website. so not seem to or apparently but matter of fact like. robots.txt works for the intended audience

Not being indexed is different from not being crawled.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#128

Post by haswell »

Tostino wrote: post #107
haswell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you arguing that these are equivalent actions? The entire web was built on the understanding that humans generally operate browsers, and robots.txt is specifically for scenarios in which they do not. To pretend that the automated reading of websites by AI agents is not something different…is quite a stretch.

I see it as very different. I the human want the data from that request. I am using a tool to get it for me. Should I not be able to execute curl to download a webpage because the "understanding that humans generally operate browsers"?

> I the human want the data from that request. I am using a tool to get it for me.

Isn't this a bit of an oversimplification, though? Especially when the tool you're using completely alters the relationship between the content author and the reader?

I hear this argument often: "it's just another tool and we've always used tools". But would you acknowledge that some tools change the dynamics entirely?

> Should I not be able to execute curl to download a webpage because the "understanding that humans generally operate browsers"?

Executing curl to download a webpage is nothing new, and compared to a traditional browser, has about the same impact. This is still drastically different than asking an AI agent to gather information and one of the pages it happens to "read" is the one you were previously navigating to with a browser or downloading with curl.

If you're a content creator who built a site/business based on a pre-LLM understanding of the dynamics of the ecosystem, doesn't it seem reasonable to see these types of "readers" differently?

Re: Claude can now search the web

#129

Post by deivid »

joshstrange wrote: post #119
underdeserver wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not available for everyone.

> Web search is available now in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States. It is for all paid users, something OpenAI is slow on. I pay for both and I often forget to try OpenAI's new things because they roll out so slow. Sometimes it's same-day but they are all over the map in how long it takes to roll out.

For all paid users _in America_. It's not available for me in Europe.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#130

Post by hombre_fatal »

dolmen wrote: post #45
hombre_fatal wrote: post #18

Aside, does anyone know of an app like Perplexity for surfing the news in a foreign language (language practice)? Perplexity's "Explore" tab translates its news to your local language, and its curated news items are all pretty interesting, but the problem is that there are so few of them. I seem to get maybe a dozen stories in a day. I paid their subscription for a month just to listen to the news on my walk, but did…

Use a VPN to appear like being in the target country. Use a browser profile where you set the language preference to the one you target.

For which purpose?
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