ChatGPT Search • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT Search

#521

Post by namuol » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:11 PM UTC

whizzter wrote: post #300

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over a…

More competition is good, but I’m pretty sure the end result will just be, at best, a duopoly of products equally ruined by advertising for their “free” tier, and somewhat less ruined for the “premium” tier.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#522

Post by greenavocado » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:13 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #505

greenavocado wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless. Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a m…

Despite all the comments it still works pretty well for me. I feel like they've improved it a bit in the last year or so so you don't get way too much Quora and GitHub/Stackoverflow clones. The level of sponsored results for some queries is way OTT, and obviously any kind of search like "best laptop 2024" is never going to give you good results (probably because they don't exist), but other than that I'm still pretty…

Here's an easy test case on a topic which is HEAVILY modified by Google. There are many such cases Google distorts searches but the following query is purely for illustration of the problem because it is so obvious.

1. Search Google for "ukrainian who shot his commanding officer" without quotes

2. Google serves me nothing but MSM articles of Russian this or that. The word Russian wasn't even in my search string.

3. Add the Google operator MINUS SIGN Russia

4. Results:

  a) Policeman feared Chris Kaba would kill, court told

  b) Media: Russian Repeated Offender Kills Five More His ...

  c) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena ...

  d) Ukrainian Galician Army

  e) Article from 2017 entitled Killed Defense Intelligence Officer Was "The First Donetsk Cyborg"

  f) Shots fired at car carrying Ukrainian President Zelenskiy's ...

5. Go to yandex.com and search the original query

6. It comes up on Yandex immediately with the original query

Re: ChatGPT Search

#523

Post by hightrix » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:13 PM UTC

whiplash451 wrote: post #435

wvenable wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? I think it's already compelling enough to replace the current paradigm. Search is pretty much dead to me. I have to end every search with "reddit" to get remotely useful results. The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetize…

For what it’s worth, sama said at a Harvard event recently that he “despised” ads and would use them at a last resort. It came across as genuine and I have the intuition/hope that they might find an alternative.

The original Google whitepaper warned against the exact moves Google made years later with ads. It's fun to go back and read their thoughts on ads and how they completely change the incentives of the search provider. "fun" in that they were right and search quality has decreased considerably because of it.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#524

Post by jaybna » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #456

jaybna wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I get your point. But the current situation is clearly not tolerable.

I wish there were some way to get something like Polis (https://pol.is/home) in place for web results. As screwed us as X/Twitter is, Community Notes (Polis-based) has real potential. It is much harder to game. There are so many times I wish I could "downvote" garbage Google results, and it seems to me with a good trust algorithm that, those who did this responsibly would be considered pretty good gatekeepers. Absent that, chaos might be better than a committee choosing for us. Right now, we have the worst of all worlds - a committee (Google) vs. a gagillion spammers.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#525

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:20 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #436

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

I genuinely think Kagi has led the way on this one. Simplicity is beautiful and effective, and Kagi has (IMHO) absolutely nailed it with their AI approach. It's one of those things that in hindsight seems obvious, which is a pretty good measure of how good an idea is IMHO. Google could have done it and kind of tried, although they're AI sucks too much. I'm very surprised that OpenAI hasn't done this sooner as well. T…

> I'm also cautiously optimistic though. We'll get there, but it's gonna be a bit shakey for a minute or two.

But I don't understand how all of these AI results (note I haven't used Kagi so I don't know if it's different) don't fundamentally and irretrievably break the economics of the web. The "old deal" if you will is that many publishers would put stuff out on the web for free, but then with the hope that they could monetize it (somehow, even just with something like AdSense ads) on the backend. This "deal" was already getting a lot worse over the past years as Google had done more and more to keep people from ever needing to click through in the first place. Sure, these AI results have citation results, but the click-through rates are probably abysmal.

Why would anyone ever publish stuff on the web for free unless it was just a hobby? There are a lot of high quality sites that need some return (quality creators need to eat) to be feasible, and those have to start going away. I mean, personally, for recipes I always start with ChatGPT now (I get just the recipe instead of "the history of the domestication of the tomato" that Google essentially forced on recipe sites for SEO competitive reasons), but why would any site now ever want to publish (or create) new high quality recipes?

Can someone please explain how the open web, at least the part of the web the requires some sort of viable funding model for creators, can survive this?

Re: ChatGPT Search

#526

Post by hightrix » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:20 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #467

rawgabbit wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the key difference between ChatGPT Search and Google is the feedback mechanism. With ChatGPT, I can give a thumbs up or thumbs down; this means that OpenAI will optimize for users thumbs up. With Google, the feedback is if I click on an Ad; this means that Google optimizes for clickbait.

I have no doubt that Google’s search team is optimizing for the best results. The problem is their ads team is optimizing for revenue. You can’t optimize for two things at the same time without compromising (the optimum is the Pareto frontier).

In my opinion, the issue is that the user's definition of "best results" and Google's definition do not align, including the Search team. Google's incentives are very different than user's needs.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#527

Post by ponector » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:20 PM UTC

greenavocado wrote: post #483

umvi wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point it seems like Google switch to ML-based search instead of index based search. You can search for very specific combinations of lyrics and scenes: "eyes on me pineapple bucket of water house of cards chess time loop" and you won't surface a link to the music video featuring all of those things ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzgDVLtU6g ), you'll just get really generic results of the average of your q…

Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? I can still search things, i get results but, they're an ordered list of popular places the engine is directing me to. Some kind of filtering is occurring on nearly every search i make that's making the results feel entirely useless. Image search stopped working sometime ago and now it just runs an AI filter on whatever image you search for, tells you there's a m…

Google is extremely good if you search for a product they can advertise to you. I've recently wanted to buy lost sunglasses. Just selected them from the photo and google found exactly brand and model, with a link to the store.

If there are no sponsored links - the result is crap.

Google is good at searching, they just have no incentive to show you results.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#528

Post by devjab » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:20 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #453

whizzter wrote: post #300

This is probably Google's Altavista moment, by making their results crappier by the year in search of Ad dollars everyone has felt that there is a potential for search to be better and once that becomes available they'll be in a continious game of catch-up. Yes, Google has their own AI divisions, tons of money and SEO is to blame for part of their crappiness. But they've also _explicitly_ focused on ad-dollars over a…

There's this tech pattern of letting the cash-cow stagnate and deteriorate while focusing on high risk moonshots. This especially happens after they dominate the market. Take for example IE6, Intel, Facebook, IBM, and now Google. They have everything they need to keep things from going off the rails, management however has a tendency to delusionally assume their ship is so unsinkable that they're not even manning the…

I think it’s what is the natural consequence of handing over management to MBA types. They can’t create new things. I don’t mean that they should be programmers, engineers or whatever they’re working with. I mean that they can only exact value from something that already exists. Which is always going to be a short term strategy because the only way to do that is to make “the it” worse.

I’m not sure Facebook fits in considering they at least managed to get some other products along the way, and may get more.

I certainly don’t think Google fits the bill. Google is failing because they let their cash cow ruin everything else, not because they let it stagnate while they chased the next moonshot. Google Cloud could have easily been competitive with AWS and Azure in European Enterprise, but it’s not even considered an option because Google Advertising wouldn’t let it exist without data harvesting. Google had Office365 long before Microsoft took every organisation online. But Google failed to sell it because… well…

It’s very typical MBA though. Google has killed profitable products because those products weren’t growing enough. A silly metric really, but one which isn’t surprising when your CEO is a former McKinsey.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer company though, and at least it won’t kill people unlike Boeing.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#529

Post by javaunsafe2019 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:24 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #241

Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm? The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever. C…

Star Trek is the vision of a better world we all need in so many aspects. It’s crazy nowadays, cause we seemed to got further away instead of closer to those visions. At least less people are hungry.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#530

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:27 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #404

jsheard wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetized with ads or propaganda, it's going to be very dangerous. Not to mention that users consuming most content through a middle-man completely breaks most publishers business models. Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic. Expect to see a lot more technical countermeasures and/or lawsuits ag…

> Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic. Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement". If anything, that arrangement of publishers and providers became an actua…

> At expense of the users.

Bullshit. Users have shown time and time and time again that they prefer (generally, at large) free content, which has to be supported by ads, over actually paying directly for the labor of others.

> The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.

I tend to agree, but people can't expect content, which needs sizable amounts of time and money to produce, for free - it needs some sort of workable funding model. LLMs are only viable now because they were able to slurp up all that ad-supported content before they broke the funding model. That window is closing, and fast.