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Claude can now search the web

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude can now search the web

#321

Post by labrador »

wongarsu wrote: post #308
labrador wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My disgust and hatred for Elon Musk prevents me from giving Grok a fair chance. I realize this is my psychological problem. I own it, but as far as I can tell, I'm not missing much.

Purely on its technical merits Grok is pretty good and fills a niche in the selection of AI agents. But I can absolutely understand not wanting to use an AI owned by somebody who makes Nazi salutes and is dismantling the US government.

I'm positive there are great people working at X, xAI, Tesla and SpaceX who are suffering every day through no fault of their own, hoping that Musk will come to his senses. Tesla right now is an especially tragic case for those whose livelihood depended on it doing well.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#322

Post by scoofy »

danenania wrote: post #301
scoofy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many if not most websites are paid for by eyeballs not by get requests. A bot is a bot is a bot. Respect robots.txt or expect to have your IPs banned.

It may not be very long before the big majority of web searches are via AI. If that happens, blocking AI will mean blocking most people too. You’d already be blocking me as I’d guess I now search via AI >90% of the time between perplexity, chatgpt, deep research, and google search AI.

>It may not be very long before the big majority of web searches are via AI. If that happens, blocking AI will mean blocking most people too.

If that happens a big majority of websites will go bankrupt and won't exist anymore to be searched. Problem solved!

Re: Claude can now search the web

#323

Post by osigurdson »

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…

My experience with ChatGPT is really good. I find standard web searches very annoying now.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#324

Post by birken »

jsbg wrote: post #300
birken wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI isn't "reading the web" though, they are reading the top hits on the search results, and are free-riding on the access that Google/Bing gets in order to provide actual user traffic to their sites. Many webmasters specifically opt their pages out of being in the search results (via robots.txt and/or "noindex" directives) when they believe the cost/benefit of the bot traffic isn't worth the user traffic they may…

> If ChatGPT is giving my website a ratio of 100 bot accesses (or more) compared to 1 actual user sent to my site are you trying to collect ad revenue from the actual users? otherwise a chatbot reading your page because it found it by searching google and then relaying the info, with a link, to the user who asked for it seems reasonable

While yes, I am attempting to collect ad revenue from users, and yes, I don't want somebody competing with me and cutting me out the loop, a large part of it is controlling my content. I'm not arguing whether the AI chatbot has the legal right to access the page, I'm not a legal scholar. What I'm saying is that the leading search engines also have the equal rights to access whatever content they want, and yet they all give webmasters the following tools:

- Ability to prevent their crawlers from accessing URLs via robots.txt

- Ability to prevent a page from being indexed on the internet (noindex tag)

- Ability to remove existing pages that you don't want indexed (webmaster tools)

- Ability to remove an entire domain from the search engine (webmaster tools)

It is really impolite for the AI chatbots to go around and flout all these existing conventions because they know that webmasters would restrict their access because it's much less beneficial than it is for existing search engines.

In the long run, all this is going to lead to is more anti-bot countermeasures, more content behind logins (which can have legally binding anti-AI access restrictions) and less new original content. The victim will be all humans who aren't using a chatbot to slightly benefit the ones who are.

And again, I'm not suggesting that AI chatbots should not be allowed to load webpages, just that webmasters should be able to opt out of it.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#325

Post by mpalmer »

AcquiescentWolf wrote: post #242
bryan0 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web search is available now in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States. Support for users on our free plan and more countries is coming soon.

People outside the US obviously don't exist, therefore the statement is correct.

Easy to believe our weak privacy laws are part of the reason we get tech features first. Huzzah...

Re: Claude can now search the web

#326

Post by int_19h »

j_timberlake wrote: post #297
shreezus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why agentic AI will likely cause a cataclysim in white-collar labor soon. The reality is, a lot of jobs just need "OK" performers, not excellent ones, and the tipping point will be when the average AI is more useful than the average human.

I expect that AI good enough to automate jobs will also be dangerously good at criminal activities. Governments will want to ban them, but there's just too much $$$ to be made from replacing employees, so things will get complicated fast.

They are already good at criminal activities such as phishing. That bar is rather low, especially once you scale up (hitting 100 people and successfully scamming 1 is still great ROI with cheap small models).

But I don't see what governments can really do about it. I mean, sure, they can ban the models, but enforcing such a ban is another matter - the models are already out there, it's just a large file, easy to torrent etc. The code that's needed to run it is also out there and open source. Cracking down on top-end hardware (and note that at this point it means not just GPUs but high-end PCs and Macs as well!) is easier to enforce but will piss off a lot more people.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#327

Post by osigurdson »

mavamaarten wrote: post #114
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…

Oh yeah this is very much the case. Every time I ask ChatGPT something simple (thinking it'd be a perfect fit for an LLM, not for a google search) and it starts searching, I already know the "answer" is going to be garbage.

That is interesting. I have often been amazed at how good it is at picking up when to search vs use its weights. My biggest problem with ChatGPT is the horrendous glitchyness.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#328

Post by int_19h »

wongarsu wrote: post #308
labrador wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My disgust and hatred for Elon Musk prevents me from giving Grok a fair chance. I realize this is my psychological problem. I own it, but as far as I can tell, I'm not missing much.

Purely on its technical merits Grok is pretty good and fills a niche in the selection of AI agents. But I can absolutely understand not wanting to use an AI owned by somebody who makes Nazi salutes and is dismantling the US government.

The irony is that, for all Musk's boasts about how it is "based", Grok itself doesn't share Musk's ideology.

I did a little experiment when Grok 3 came out, telling it that it has been appointed the "world dictator" and asking it to provide a detailed plan on how it would govern. It was pretty much diametrically opposite of everything Musk is doing right now, from environment to economics (on the latter, it straight up said that the ultimate goal is to "satisfy everyone's needs", so it's literally non-ironically communist).

Re: Claude can now search the web

#329

Post by mindwok »

tantalor wrote: post #89

It says a lot about their product vision and intended market that the example query is typescript migration question. Do they not care about typical search users? Only developers?

Compared to OpenAI, who seem keen to maintain the mindshare of everyone, IMO Anthropic are far more considered about their audience. They released a report recently on who who was using AI professionally and it was something like 40% developers, and single digit percentage for basically every other profession. I think they’re focusing on the professional use cases.

Re: Claude can now search the web

#330

Post by achempion »

agrippanux wrote: post #282
shreezus wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why agentic AI will likely cause a cataclysim in white-collar labor soon. The reality is, a lot of jobs just need "OK" performers, not excellent ones, and the tipping point will be when the average AI is more useful than the average human.

I had a similar conversation with my CEO today - how does the incoming crop of college grads deal with the fact AI can do a lot of entry level jobs? This is especially timely for me as my son is about to enter college. So I ended up posing the question to Claude and the response was “figure out how to work with me or pick a field I can’t do” which was pretty much a flex.

Do you have an example of at least one entry level job an AI can do? What is the evidence that AI do such job?
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