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

AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

iai.tv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 415 posts

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#31

Post by lerchmo »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #3
mustafabisic1 wrote: post #2

But they have the potential. We'll see if it breaks into public. People at some point were even saying Tikto will replace search engines. Both of which can still happen.

I don’t think they do. At least not in a safe way. The AI doesn’t understand meaning or the underlying material and concepts. I’m sure filters will be put into a pipeline but it will never be as good as letting the human sniff out the correct answers.

"Will never be" is an overly confident statement for any technical field. Predicting the future is hard and predicting the future with an un-bounded time horizon is pretty near impossible.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#32

Post by mc32 »

The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on eggshells.

It can’t give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not add value to an answer and actually makes the search more tedious.

If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod it to finally give me government statistics but it doest it begrudgingly. And that’s for a far away country not steeped in any unusual crime controversy.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#33

Post by lerchmo »

shagie wrote: post #28
nomel wrote: post #6

A chat bot isn’t allowed to use external APIs or present things besides conversational text? Seems short sighted. Todays chat bots should be considered dumb prototypes, when thinking about even the near future.

Today's chatbots are complex language models based on the language that they were trained on. They are very clever at transforming data into language, or one language into another... but they work on language and not knowledge . It would be interesting to see a language model identify the necessary resources to fulfill a query which is then fed back into it to transform the dry data back into language. Identify if th…

I mean you can give chatgtp API docs and it will write the actual code to find the answers.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#34

Post by userbinator »

They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are turning into AI chatbots too.

When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", not an "AI".

Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components is the most prominent application where search engines like Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going to work there either.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#35

Post by williamtrask »

dilap wrote: post #30
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask: "What's a good social website for people of a technical bent" It recommended: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Quora, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, GitHub That's a pretty good list! Tried the same search on Google, and the first result was some spammy site "15 top social networks," #1 being facebook. Not very useful. I definitely think chatbots will replace many uses of s…

It’s not that google can’t do this. It’s that the incentives prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there’s a plausible way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel real.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#36

Post by TOMDM »

bombcar wrote: post #21
halukakin wrote: post #10

Today I experienced just the opposite. Chatgpt answered some business questions in less than a minute. I would have spent 30 mins in seo optimized sites to find the exact same info.

How do you verify that chatgpt answers are correct? (And to be honest, how do you gauge the correctness of random internet sites)?

To speak to GP's point, a number of times already I've failed to find something immediately on Google, asked chatgpt, gotten an answer and then used Google to verify chatgpt's answer.

Google is great if you already know exactly what you're looking for, for a lot of topics chatgpt is already better than Google if you don't

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#38

Post by asimjalis »

Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT.

Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#39

Post by gukov »

dilap wrote: post #30
gukov wrote: post #22

The way I see it: - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of documents - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect document based on millions of the documents To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others currently. I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am ready to pay for somet…

ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask: "What's a good social website for people of a technical bent" It recommended: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Quora, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, GitHub That's a pretty good list! Tried the same search on Google, and the first result was some spammy site "15 top social networks," #1 being facebook. Not very useful. I definitely think chatbots will replace many uses of s…

Another way to look at ChatGPT is it being a smart RSS reader. It's the way it discards all the WordPress layout junk giving you just the meat in a text format.

The biggest advantage Google currently has is their massive indexing ability. ChatGPT is oblivious to something that just happened (ie was posted) an hour ago, a day ago, heck, a month ago.

Re: AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines

#40

Post by m_mueller »

type4 wrote: post #26

It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that. That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then…

and by extension: the ability and expression of doubt / humility. knowing what you don't know is when you reach a certain maturity, which so far all these AIs seem to lack.
Post reply on HN