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OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

chatgpt.com

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Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#41

People with websites used to have a clear reason to allow bots to crawl and index our sites. Google and everyone sent us traffic. There was something of a trade off. Google has been slowly changing that trade by displaying more and more of our sites on google.com rather than sending people our way. As far as I can see there's no sending people away from SearchGPT, it just gives answers. I can't see any reason to allo…

If you want ChatGPT to say nice things about you (or bad things about your competitors), then you'll need to give it your version of information - at least that will be the line peddled to us.

I've already received emails from SEO snake oil sellers now advertising themselves as being able to influence ChatGPT output.

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#43

GG Google and I couldn't be more pleased. It may not be this specific iteration that kills it, but a search product with AI (and without trash) is what will dethrone it. I'm already using ChatGPT for ~30% of the queries I used to use Google for. I prefer hallucinations to ads, to be honest. They were right to call Code Red when GPT came out, but their response to it has been extremely poor, even when they had all the…

OK but this is the same pattern as image uploading services - https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

1. google was a good search engine when it was less profitable

2. now that it is more profitable, it is bad

Importantly, it was possible for Google to be good AND profitable at the same time! Roughly from 2003-2013 perhaps.

1. OpenAI is nowhere near profitable ... it seems to be heavily dependent on Microsoft, and in some sense on Microsoft's desire to compete with Google in certain areas

2. If it ever becomes profitable, does anyone want to argue it won't get significantly worse? It will probably have a bunch of bad side effects, like Google's decline did on the web itself

I guess this is "normal", but it also seems pretty inefficient to me ... Part of the problem is that "free" is a special price that users like

IMO it would have be nice if Google search was sustainable at a high quality -- I think it easily could have been

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#44
post #12

Perhaps no-one could answer my question in [0] because many (including me) knew OpenAI would release their own search engine; eventually in [0]. "Who can tell me how and why is Perplexity.ai is worth $1BN? How much revenue are they making vs the amount of money they are burning? What is the justification of this valuation?" [0] At this point with this unsurprising announcement, Perplexity is worth [0] https://news.yc…

Company valuations never have an explanation. At all. It's all whatever people at the moment guessed, usually with so little information that you'd be infuriated.

For non-traded companies, it's even worse, because it's less people, at fewer moments, and they don't even need to be honest. As a first approximation, non-traded companies do not have a valuation, any number you get is bullshit and you can get something with the same accuracy by just asking ChatGPT.

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#45

People with websites used to have a clear reason to allow bots to crawl and index our sites. Google and everyone sent us traffic. There was something of a trade off. Google has been slowly changing that trade by displaying more and more of our sites on google.com rather than sending people our way. As far as I can see there's no sending people away from SearchGPT, it just gives answers. I can't see any reason to allo…

> I'm glad that most of them seem to respect robots.txt.

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/blob/main/tab...

Some of them identify themselves by user agent but don't respect robots.txt, so you have to set up your server to 403 their requests to keep them out. If they start obfuscating their user agents then there won't be an easy solution besides deferring to a platform like CloudFlare which offers to play that cat and mouse game on your behalf though.

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#46
I understand OpenAI had to make it cheap enough before the launch, but it feels like they're too late for this. They should've done this in 2023 H1 when Google was completely vulnerable. Now it seems to be prepared to quickly replicate the product?

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#47
post #10

This just represents such a stark lack in originality and lends even more credo to "OpenAI wants to copy its customers"

They are not research focused anymore they are a product company now.

Maybe to the point they will rebrand themselves soon

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#48

I really dislike this as OpenAI has spent the past months signing sweetheart deals with any publisher willing to sell their content for training data. It ties everything to their platform and returns a regurgitation of prioritized content without indicating any sort of sponsorship. SEO will be replaced by cold hard cash, favors, and backroom deals

If no one else does it soon I'll probably do it myself: we're long overdue for the ad-block of LLM output. I want a browser plugin that nukes it at the DOM, and I don't care how many false positives it has.

Re: OpenAI Announces SearchGPT

#49

People with websites used to have a clear reason to allow bots to crawl and index our sites. Google and everyone sent us traffic. There was something of a trade off. Google has been slowly changing that trade by displaying more and more of our sites on google.com rather than sending people our way. As far as I can see there's no sending people away from SearchGPT, it just gives answers. I can't see any reason to allo…

I clearly would not. "Slow down your site" because information is super useful when you can't search it properly.

Sites might exist for reasons other than to "be useful". At a bare minimum, they may be trying to sell eyeballs to advertisers, but they also might be trying to deliver an experience, induce some deeper engagement, make a sale, build a community, whatever.

All of that disappears when a bot devours whatever it assesses to be your "content" and then serves it up as a QA response, stripped of any of the surrounding context.

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