91–100 of 203 posts
I have found Perplexity to be very useful; if OpenAI can better Perplexity Alphabet has a big problem (at least until the opposition ruin their products by monetising them).
Have we figured out a way to monetize AI-powered search yet? Presumably a product like this (or Perplexity) will ultimately be free, in which case they'll be forced to offer ads (bringing us back to Google's status quo) or perhaps worse, we'll have "product placement" in our AI-written results.
No, and that is a big problem, search doesn't make money either. People will not actually pay the cost for AI once they have to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pla…
If I were making a search engine or AI crawler, I would simply pose as Googlebot
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
> Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. Don't get me wrong, search has become extremely problematic, ... but how much effort does it take really? Compared to writing a letter, reading a map, walking half a mile etc? The google results for "music festivals in boone north carolina august" are completely adequate. If not then you search again, sur…
Whether this gets AI out of being a money pit remains to be seen.
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.
Finally, the inevitable product we all knew was coming: going after Google’s core biz I like the follow up questions feature but how is it different than chat gpt - just providing links as well?
Meta is out to commodotize Google's core product (Search). Meta's foray into Open Source AI is likely to hurt more as Google's distribution advantages (via Chrome and Android) is close to insurmountable for one rival search engine to make any meaningful dent by going toe-to-toe.
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 pla…
They also have a feature that will, if a user pastes a URL into their chat, go fetch the data and do something with it in response to the user's query. This is the feature that made a big kerfuffle on HN a while back when someone noticed it [0].
That second feature is not a web crawler in any meaningful sense of the word "crawler". It looks up exactly one URL that the user asked for and does something with it. It's Perplexity acting as a User Agent in the original sense of the word: a user's agent for accessing and manipulating data on the open web.
If an AI agent manipulating a web page that I ask it to manipulate in the way I ask it to manipulate it is considered abusive then so are ad blockers, reader mode, screen readers, dark reader, and anything else that gives me access to open web content in a form that the author didn't originally intend.
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.
Well, if you don't care how many false positives it has, just block everything. But there's no even remotely reliable way to detect LLM output if it isn't deliberately watermarked to facilitate that, so you aren't going to get anything that is actually good at that.
So, Google already does this, right? And most of the feedback I've seen is: "how the hell do we turn this off".