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ChatGPT Search

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Re: ChatGPT Search

#641

Post by varenc »

rawgabbit wrote: post #415
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…

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.

You’re also giving Google feedback when you click a search result link. Presumably that should be a huge signal for measuring search quality.

Heck, Google even promoted the `ping`[0] anchor attribute feature so they can log what link you click without slowing you down. (Firefox doesn’t support ping, which means when Firefox users click on a Google search result link they’re sent to an internal google.com URL first and then redirected for logging purposes)

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...

Re: ChatGPT Search

#642

Post by resters »

In many ways it's probably already more useful than Google. Regular GPT-4 dramatically reduced my need to search Google for anything.

However it refused to search the internet for instances of my email address. Not sure what the benefit of hiding powerful functionality is.

I would like it to work as follows:

- using a model with an extremely large context size, analyze the top n results for a particular search phrase and store it in a vector db and let my chat session interact with it.

- it does not have to return results immediately, it could ask follow-up questions to reduce scope and improve the signal to noise ratio, or decide to augment the initial search on its own, once the searcher's goal is better understood.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#643

Post by rsync »

krackers wrote: post #576
rsync wrote: post #463

I maintain a little page titled "Misc. information I want search engines to find"[1] and so I asked ChatGPT things that are answered there: "How much tea tree oil by volume is in Dr Bronners tea tree oil liquid soap?" A. ... However, the exact volume or percentage of tea tree oil in the formulation is not publicly disclosed by the manufacturer. (which is incorrect, as the manufacturer disclosed it to me and I publish…

Why should anyone trust your page though about Dr Bronners tea tree oil? "Not publicly disclosed" seems like the better answer compared to citing some random yahoo on the web who may be lying.

That’s what the source attribution is for.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#644

Post by [deleted] »

skipants wrote: post #595
freedomben wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could it be that Kagi benefits from being niche, though? Google search gets gamed because it’s the most popular and therefore gaming it gives the best return. I wonder if Kagi would have the same issues if it was the top dog.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Search

#645

Post by j_bum »

nbaksalyar wrote: post #560
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…

> Has google completely stopped working for anyone else? Yes. However, I found that https://scholar.google.com still works perfectly well. It feels just as the old Google without all the crap they've been adding in the last years.

God please don’t let them touch Google Scholar.

I can’t imagine the cost this would have on scientific producivity in the West.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#646

Post by ProllyInfamous »

cvburgess wrote: post #369
_andrei_ wrote: post #345

Pretty underwhelming, I've been using on Kagi's assistant [0] for the past few months and it's much better. I can `!chat what i want to search for` in my address bar any time, and Kagi will do the search and then open a chat with the LLM of my choice (3.5 Sonnet) and the results in context. It can also do further searches. [0] https://kagi.com/assistant

Second this, Assistant is a game-changer for me. Its the usefulness of AI with footnotes that give me confidence that I can know where that came from and if I trust it. Especially for product reviews, being able to use lenses that filter out sites I don't trust and then run AI on top of it is pretty cool.

>Its the usefulness of AI with footnotes that give me confidence that I can know where that came from and if I trust it.

I have been using http://www.Perplexity.AI since January 2023 for this exact reason. Unfortunately, since that incredible first UI (of yesteryear) it has been downgraded extensively (including no longer displaying footnotes, just adding numerals to the ends of factual sentences with tooltips).

The greatest thing about Perplexity is still that you do not have to log in (although it will bug you, particularly after lengthier or insightful conversations). Once a search/hybrid/chatGPT (how I've used it for almost yearS now) requires a log-in, it will immediately not be able to compete well with open-facing search engines like Google.

I have this same hesitation about using a pay search engine like Kagi, but am definitely intrigued by some of the other commenters' descriptions of the AI Assistant part of their service offering.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#647

Post by jmyeet »

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…

Will ChatGPT (and other products like it) find a niche use case for what Google search covers? Yes.

Will it replace Google in the mass market? No. Why? Power. I don't mean how good the product is. I mean the literaly electricity.

There are key metrics that Google doesn't disclose as part of its financials. These include thing slike the RPM (Revenue per Thousand Searches) but it also must include something like the cost of running a thousand searches when you amortize everything involved. All the indexing, the software development and so on. That will get reduced to a certain amount of CPU time and storage.

If I had to guess, I would guess that ChatGPT uses orders of magnitude more CPU power and electricity than the average Google search.

Imagine trying to serve 10-50M+ (just guessing) ChatGPT searches every secondj. What kind of computing infrastructure would that take? How much would it cost? How would you monetize it?

Re: ChatGPT Search

#648

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Search

#649

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

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…

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Re: ChatGPT Search

#650

Post by veesahni »

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…

it seems google switched to some kind of semantic search instead of word based search. It doesn't search for what your words are, but instead what your words kindof sortof mean. Which means you always get 'average' results instead of precise results.

This may make it better for the non-tech folks who search for things in unclear language, and likely make it worse for those who search with precision (i.e. much of the HN crowd).

Most importantly, they make their money off ads, and it probably makes sense to optimize for the non-tech folks. The ones that don't run ad blockers and accidentally click the barely differentiable ads.

In short - I suspect they're just using new tech to make more money.

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