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ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

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Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#421
post #161

but chat is not a search engine, so it will not replace them but it will make them obsolete. I dont see any of this obstacles as substantial. conversational systems will take us back to the original, "bladerunner" concept of technology as something that gives us answers, not something that gives us the books to find the answers The main hurdle for openAI is that it must find a way to link back to the web so that peop…

> not something that gives us the books to find the answers And what if you want more than the generic summary answer? You could keep asking questions, but at some point, you might not know what to ask or what the alternative answers might be, particularly on a controversial topic, or one where the answer isn't fully known. And there could be lots of reasons you might want to visit a site over just getting an answer.…

Good point and that's why I recently came to an interpretation that search engines return some kind of "tables" for us (but not in the tabular form). List of links are rows, and for every link we have properties ("columns"): the title of the page, the date, the snippet with phrases containing our terms. The same is true for stackexchange.com/stackoverflow.com pages, the answers are rows, the text, score, comments are properties of this row. We are used to scanning this "tables" either for finding best answers or exploring multiple variants of answers. But single answer for everything is too limiting.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expand on that?

They license search results from other search engines, and other search engines have the ability to increase their fees anytime they want to make Kagi suffocate if needed. It's not sustainable.

There is a an objective risk of building on top of somebody else's platform. However, that does not mean that the business model is not sound, but that perhaps the execution may be limited in terms of how big it can get. (Kagi's aspiration was never to be a Google killer [1]).

Companies are built on top of other platforms all the time. TikTok is building on top of iOS and Android. Zynga made first $1bn building on top of Facebook platform. Honey a chrome extension was acquired for $4bn. Those are all businesses building on top of somebody elses platform.

In terms of Google's motiviation to suffocate it, even if Kagi had 10 million customers, it would be a drop in the sea for Google. And Kagi's very existence helps Google with monopoly issues so it is hard to see why would Google want to openly suffocate it. Even if it did, there are plenty of other search indexes out there (Bing, Yandex, Mojeek...) that Kagi can source. What users love about Kagi is not just the quality of search but innovative search features that are independent of results.

What matters at the end of the day, is that Kagi is already serving thousands of paying customers, they love the product and if anything that is the validation that a business model is working.

[1] https://kagi.com/faq#Google-killer

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#423
post #411
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why couldn't ad-free gmail and search be a $20 addon to your internet plan? A lot of ISPs include email. and it is usually terrible.

Sure, but it’s not because of the lack of ads, but rather because they know virtually nobody uses it. I was imagining paid Gmail, but Internet “with Gmail(tm)” being a bundle they would advertise, like when DirecTV offered TiVo. Or when you can buy HBO through Amazon Prime.

But nobody uses it because it isn't as good as gmail. Before Gmail, it was a lot more common to use your ISP's email. And given the current monopoly power of ISPs I'm pretty doubtful that any such bundling would be in users' best interests.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's check back on this in a few years. The idea that a search engine can cite experts but a LLM cannot sounds wrong to me.

If that's how you feel then maybe you need to re-evaluate what an LLM does.

Turns out, we only needed to wait a couple of days: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neevaai

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#425

I remember when web search engines were new. And boy did they suck. You wouldn’t get what you wanted a lot of the time, and they were very finicky about the input query. These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house” I’m not sure ChatGPT is going to replace search engines, but I’m confident that it is incredibly young and will evolve c…

Donnie Darko, btw.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's how you feel then maybe you need to re-evaluate what an LLM does.

Turns out, we only needed to wait a couple of days: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neevaai

I hate to break it to you, but that was posted 8 days ago, 3 days before my comment.

It existing doesn't make it a good idea.

I stand by what I said.

Re: ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon

#427
post #312
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that every information service should be free with ads is one of the main poisons that have made the cesspool that is the net today. Imagine how different the incentives would be if Facebook and Google just made money by making their endusers happy enough to keep their memberships active with a small monthly fee. Their customers would be the end users, instead of being the advertisers.

Reality doesn’t lend support toward your arguments. I assume you’re from a first-world country, based upon your comment. - Google’s 2022 revenue was $250B. (We’ll assume that’s all ads.) - 8B people in the world; we’ll assume only 4B people have internet access to the web. How much would Google have to charge to break even? $250B/yr / 4B people = $62.5/yr/person = $5/month/person What does the world income distributi…

Does that google figure include YouTube?
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