341–350 of 504 posts
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It want stay long. You are now in the pre ad phase. As soon as the ads are integrated the answers will become worse.
They have something Google never had: a paid tier. There are plenty of revenue models aside from ads.
SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm. Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for keywords related to their business.
I would argue that advertising ruined the web. SEO for sites selling real products only goes so far. People are often searching for information, and monetizing that activity through advertising is what caused the disaster of low quality content flooding the web today. I'm not saying things would be perfect without advertising, just much better than they are now.
The real thing that ruined the open web and viability of search was, ironically, when Google killed display advertising by cutting Adsense payouts to near zero.
Now publishers monetize via the much more sinister “affiliate” marketing. You know, when you search for “Best [X]” and get assaulted with 1,000 listicles packed with affiliate links for junk the author has never even seen in person.
At least in the old system, you knew that an ad was an ad! Now the content itself is corrupted to the core.
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That's (obviously) a bit of an exaggeration. BERT is just another transformer architecture. Cut down from ~100 layers to 1, ~1k dimensions to ~10, and ~10k tokens to 100, and you're only 1e6 faster / more efficient, still a factor of 10k greater than your estimate and also too small to handle the detection you're describing with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
I literally have DistilBERT models that can do this exact task in ~14ms on an NVIDIA A6000. I don’t know the precise performance per watt, but it’s really fucking low. I use LLM to help with training data as they are great at zero shot, but after the training corpora is built a small, well trained, model will smoke an LLM in classification accuracy and are way faster - which means you can get scale and low carbon cos…
And, yes, purpose-built models definitely have their place even with the advent of LLMs. I'm happy to see more people working on that sort of thing.
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But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (wher…
Like you, I thought typing questions into Google was wrong for a long time. The times have changed; this is how most people interact with Google, and it really does convey intent to the system better now that we have sufficiently powerful NLP.
Just sharing an anecdote: I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a somewhat obscure source. Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events. o…
I mean just de-ranking any article with an affiliate link alone would skyrocket the relevance of what content you surface on search.
The problem for Google is, they’re incentivized to make the results worse than the SERP ads. If the organic results are too good, nobody would ever click the ads. And they basically gutted the 3rd party Adsense ecosystem, so they no longer monetize off third party sites. That to me, was the dumbest decision in company history — basically leading to the dilemma they’re in now. They squeezed all the profit in the short term while killing the open web in the long term.
You can’t have a product that purports to help people search the open web…while simultaneously trying to sabotage people from organically clicking on the open web. It’s pure idiocy.
The answer is staring them right in the face with Youtube, who faces zero threat to their dominance. Turns out if you just surface the best stuff and rev-share the ad money with the content creators (like they used to do with blogs via Adsense) then 1) the creators keep producing good stuff 2) the product stays useful and 3) importantly the monopoly profits continue minting!
Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with inf…
But I don't think Google is part of them, or their slave. I think Google is our last line of defense.
True, it's not very effective; more like the knight in Monty Python's Sacred Grail. Still, when we lose Google, we'll have nothing else.
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Perhaps a more common question: "How many calories do men need to lose weight?" Google AI responded: "To lose weight, men typically need to reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories" Which is obviously dangerous advice. IMO Google AI overviews should not show up for anything (a) medical or (b) numerical. LLMs just aren't safe enough yet.
I think even when the answer is "right" in some sense, it should probably come within the context of a bunch of caveats, explanations, etc. But maybe I'm just weird. Oftentimes when my wife or kids ask me a question, I take a deep breath and start to say something like "I know what you're asking, but there's not a simple or straightforward answer; it's important to first understand ____ or define ____..." by which ti…
Don't bet on AI staying clean. A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the integrity of the search results as just some isolated people taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their trick gets blocked. It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart people working on it full time, day in, day out, with inf…
Advertising industry.
I wish I knew what it would take for people to stop treating the unholy blend of marketing communications as respectable occupation, and consider it for what it is: a guild of liars ruining lives and societies.
Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google