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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#21

Post by SoftTalker »

myself248 wrote: post #10
gerdesj wrote: post #8

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,…

> I've entirely given up on Google.

I have used Google very little for about 3 years now. Sometimes when DDG fails to find what I'm looking for I'll try Google. It rarely works better.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#23

Post by devilbunny »

sgarland wrote: post #16
myself248 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Altavista was the OG. I remember it being cantankerous and requiring you to specific in how you searched, but if you knew how to use it, it was unmatched. Until Google.

It was fast, which almost nothing else was at the time.

And if people on dialup connections think you’re slow, it’s because you are.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#24

Post by ars »

sgarland wrote: post #16
myself248 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Altavista was the OG. I remember it being cantankerous and requiring you to specific in how you searched, but if you knew how to use it, it was unmatched. Until Google.

When Google came out it was way better than Altavista, people switched instantly. Specifically Altavista looked at how often a search term was in the result, which wasn't always a helpful thing. Google also noticed if search terms were near each other in a page which was really helpful, otherwise you would get forums with one search term in one message, and the other far away in an unrelated message. Google fixed that.

The web has changed these days, it's an adversarial system now, where web results are aggressively bad and constantly trying to trick you. Google is much harder to implement now.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#25

Post by jay_kyburz »

alisonatwork wrote: post #14
jay_kyburz wrote: post #11

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…

We already have that and it's Wikipedia.

Can you imagine how much better it would be if people were paid to create the content!

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#26

Post by mplanchard »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #19
hug wrote: post #15

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…

I second the recommendation for Kagi. It just blows all competitors out of the water in my opinion, and I'm happy to pay for it as long as they keep that quality up.

Third. The ability to uprank sites makes the “finding known content” use case absolutely amazing. The specific postgres docs case in the blog post is one I am constantly using kagi as my external brain for.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#27

Post by gofreddygo »

boothby wrote: post #2

> 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…

> how long until advertisers get their grubby meathooks into the training data

You're so right. it's not an if anymore, but when. and when it does, you wouldn't know what's an ad and what isn't.

In recent years i started noticing a correlation between alcohol consumption and movies. I couldn't help but notice how many of the movies I've seen in the past few years promote alcohol and try to correlate it with the good times. how many of these are paid promotions? I don't know.

and now, after noticing, this every movie that involves alcohol has become distasteful for me mostly because it casts a shadow on the negative side of alcohol consumption.

I can see how ads in an LLM can go the same route, deeply embedded in the content and indistinguishable from everything else.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#28

Post by nehal3m »

cbsmith wrote: post #12

Some curious misconceptions here about how the search industry works. 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…

This reeks of “communism is when capitalism” to me, because:

>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.

But then how come that is exactly what is happening with modern search engines? It’s just always advertising that comes along and fucks up a good thing.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#29

Post by aardvarkr »

boothby wrote: post #2

> 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 think for the moment the leading AI companies are strongly incentivized to not succumb to the advertising curse. Their revenue is subscription driven and the competition is ridiculously fierce and immune to collusion. Everyone is trying to one-up everyone else and there is no moat that locks you into a single product. Their incentive is to score as high as possible on benchmarks in order to drive up their user base in order to increase subscriptions. Any time spent on implementing advertising is time their adversaries are spending making their models better. Let’s hope the competition stays fierce so that we don’t get enshitification anytime soon

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#30

Post by shwouchk »

boothby wrote: post #2

> 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…

this is already happening in full force. sota models are already poisoned. leading providers already push their own products inside webchat system prompts.
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