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Google changes its search box

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Re: Google changes its search box

#841

Post by reaperducer »

SkyBelow wrote: post #164
nilamo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's wrong 2 out of 5 times, why even waste your time going to it in the first place? That's a massive failure rate.

Because being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly. Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickl…

Because being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly.

Please don't ever go into aerospace. Or healthcare. Or engineering. Or pretty much anything that actually matters.

Re: Google changes its search box

#842

Post by taude »

ethbr1 wrote: post #753
acron0 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.

We're already post dead info. The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades. Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise... ... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever. Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation…

What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.

Re: Google changes its search box

#843

Post by mghackerlady »

CSMastermind wrote: post #691
mghackerlady wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs are good answer engines, but terrible search engines. For example, if I just want the answer to "How do I foo this bar with a thingamajig", or "what kind of foo exists for bar", LLMs are 100% better because they'll give me an answer without trying to sell me their thing or pump me with ads. It also lets me go more in depth than the very surface level seo spam sites that appear when you do a search like t…

That hasn't been my experience, I use LLMs in place of search. Two examples from tonight that I asked Grok for: > Can you find the girl who did a bunch of posts critisizing David Graeber's Debt? I thought it was really well done > I saw a comment on hackernews a while ago about the optimal amount of credit card fraud being higher than zero because of game theory dynamics, can you find it. In both cases it turned up t…

I place both as questions for an answer engine. That vagueness is an element

Re: Google changes its search box

#844

Post by XCSme »

Please no, I just tried Google searching for a specific popular software name, I knew exactly what it does, but I just didn't remember the name.

Searching for some keywords, returned only 2 or 3 websites, the rest were just ads, AI summaries, related busineses and whatnot, after 4-5 searches I gave up.

I then asked ChatGPT: "what's that software name that does X", and it gave me a list, and that software was the first one.

Re: Google changes its search box

#845

Post by gwbas1c »

nicbou wrote: post #663
gwbas1c wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just won't get countless recipe websites where you have to scroll, scroll, scroll through slop about someone's day to read a scraped recipe that every other website has. This is just disruption.

Does the current Google search results indicate that they will be any different? It’s also not disruption if your product relies on the output of the industry it kills. What will AI train on when it destroys the economics of sharing information with others?

> your product relies on the output of the industry it kills

I disagree, Google doesn't rely on a massive amount of recipe websites; they rely on Google and exploit it.

More importantly: These recipes exist from many sources, not just the website that exploited Google to be first in their rankings.

Re: Google changes its search box

#846

Post by brookst »

tremon wrote: post #790
johnny_canuck wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? In this context, if Google is going to give me the recipe without having to scroll through the story, that seems like a win to me. The ad-revenue driven Internet of web 2.0 is finally dead and I'm not sure I'm all that sad.

> But ultimately that strategy is good for the consumer right? No. It may be good for the consumer right now, but not ultimately (and on top of that, I would argue that reducing everyone to a consumer is already the wrong framing -- you need to ask what's good for the citizens). Having ten competing supermarkets with various interweaving supply lines is ultimately much better than having one giant supermarket, becaus…

Do you think Walmart’s prices are higher than you’d pay if there were just ten competing stores with the same product mix, each of which did not have the leverage to squeeze suppliers?

Re: Google changes its search box

#847

Post by intended »

tapland wrote: post #362
OGWhales wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's th…

Since the best resource is personal recommendations, got any entry level cheap IEM recommendations? Primarily to avoid even more headphone dent, not an audiophile

Crinacle is where I got my IEM advice.

Re: Google changes its search box

#848

Post by gsky »

ekidd wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #10

Nilay Patel has been talking about "Google Zero" - the moment when Google effectively stops sending any traffic to other sites - for a few years now: https://www.theverge.com/24167865/google-zero-search-crash-h...

Which as some running a website raises a fascinating question. If Google is just going to crawl my sites and present information as an AI summary on their site, then what exactly do I gain by allowing Googlebot to crawl my sites?

I asked the exact question back in 2011 when they were showing images directly leaving me pay for bandwidth out of my pocket

Re: Google changes its search box

#849

Post by jazzypants »

duskdozer wrote: post #773
daemin wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely you're going to get a search engine which returns results as short 5 second AI generated video clips with an infinite scroll. (Torment Nexus rules apply here)

As it turns out I found out some people use tiktok as a search engine. How exactly, I am not sure.

You search for a term and then you watch videos until you're satisfied. I don't think it's a very good way to learn about a topic, but millions of people seem to disagree with me. It makes more sense when you remember that 21% of the American population is functionally illiterate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Re: Google changes its search box

#850

Post by brookst »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #814
ozim wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we go and pay to Cloudeflare or other cloud providers you host sites with to prevent Google from scraping. Let the big guys fight it out. There is money in protecting the websites. If you host with OVH they are interested in you making money so you can pay them.

This won't work because Google just pays Cloudflare to enable scraping.

Any evidence for this claim?
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