[HN Gopher] ChatGPT Search
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       ChatGPT Search
        
       Author : marban
       Score  : 668 points
       Date   : 2024-10-31 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (openai.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | AKA Bing Search in ChatGPT.
       | 
       | So it is not it's own search engine and is still using Bing for
       | its results just like the rest of them.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | That makes for a fair side-by-side comparison, then.
        
         | findthewords wrote:
         | If it's better than Bing or Google in presenting the relevant
         | result in a condensed way, it's still a win for the users.
        
           | PittleyDunkin wrote:
           | > If it's better than Bing or Google in presenting the
           | relevant result in a condensed way
           | 
           | This doesn't matter if the results are user-hostile, as both
           | search engines are.
        
           | arromatic wrote:
           | Why would i want condensed results ? Why Do you think i would
           | want to have a condensed version of this post [0] for
           | example.
           | 
           | [0] https://danluu.com/ballmer/
        
         | sidcool wrote:
         | Is it mentioned on that page? Didn't see it.
        
           | tredre3 wrote:
           | To provide relevant responses to your questions, ChatGPT
           | searches based on your prompts and may share disassociated
           | search queries with third-party search providers such as
           | Bing. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and
           | Microsoft's privacy policy. ChatGPT also collects general
           | location information based on your IP address and may share
           | it with third-party search providers to improve the accuracy
           | of your results.
           | 
           | https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search
           | (TFA links to it in the _How it works_ section)
        
             | sidcool wrote:
             | Thanks.
        
         | solfox wrote:
         | Reference? This isn't mentioned anywhere and certainly is not
         | implied.
        
         | DrBenCarson wrote:
         | No, it's using the Bing index. The generated responses are
         | OpenAI
         | 
         | Many search engines use the Bing index but return different
         | results
        
       | sidcool wrote:
       | It will be fun to see how they stand up to Google and Perplexity.
       | I feel they are a bit late in the search game, but excited to see
       | what they cook
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Anyone can compete as long as they have a sufficiently robust
         | crawl dataset as a foundation, no?
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | A fossilized snapshot will only get them so far, and sites
           | are increasingly opting to block AI-related crawlers.
           | Apparently about a quarter of the top 1000 sites already
           | block GPTBot: https://originality.ai/ai-bot-blocking
           | 
           | I guess they could be using Bing as their search backend,
           | which would mostly get around the blocking issue (except for
           | searching Reddit which blocks Bingbot now).
        
             | toomuchtodo wrote:
             | Certainly, countermeasures against crawler blocking will be
             | a necessary component of effective search corpus
             | aggregation in the go forward. Otherwise, search will
             | balkanize around who will pay the most for access to public
             | content. Common Crawl is ~10PB, this is not insurmountable.
             | 
             | Edit: I understand there is a freerider/economic issue
             | here, unsure how to solve that as the balance between
             | search engine/gen AI systems and content stores/providers
             | becomes more adversarial.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | AFAIK OpenAI currently respects robots.txt, so we'll have
               | to see if they change that policy out of desperation at
               | some point.
        
               | andrethegiant wrote:
               | > AFAIK OpenAI currently respects robots.txt
               | 
               | I wonder to what degree -- for example, do they respect
               | the Crawl-delay directive? For example, HN itself has a
               | 30-second crawl-delay
               | (https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt), meaning that
               | crawlers are supposed to wait 30 seconds before
               | requesting the next page. I doubt ChatGPT will delay a
               | user's search of HN by up to 30 seconds, even though
               | that's what robots.txt instructs them to do.
        
             | StableAlkyne wrote:
             | If it ends up anywhere near as popular as Google, those
             | sites will have a financial incentive to allow the
             | crawlers.
             | 
             | The average person just does not discover content without
             | the search engine recommending it.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | The whole issue that site owners have with these AI
               | search engines is that there _isn 't_ a financial
               | incentive for them to cooperate, since the summarization
               | largely replaces the need for users to click through to
               | the site the information came from. No click-through, no
               | ad impressions, no possibility of the user being
               | converted into a recurring visitor or paid subscriber,
               | just pure freeloading by the search engine.
        
           | vineyardmike wrote:
           | Anyone can compete as long as they have a functional URL and
           | web page. Doesn't make them good competition, and doesn't
           | mean users will use it.
           | 
           | The issue is that "AI search" has been a hot topic for a
           | while now. Google (the default everywhere) just rolled out
           | their version to billions of users. Perplexity has been
           | iterating and acquiring customers for a while. Obviously
           | OpenAI has great potential and brand recognition, but are
           | enough people still interested in switching that haven't yet?
        
           | baby_souffle wrote:
           | > Anyone can compete as long as they have a sufficiently
           | robust crawl dataset as a foundation, no?
           | 
           | There's some sticking power/network-effect/sticky-defaults
           | effects, too, though.
           | 
           | It's _trivial_ to do a google search from anywhere on an
           | android device with at most a tap or two. You can probably
           | get close if a 3rd party has a well integrated native app but
           | that'll require work on the user's behalf to make it the
           | default (where possible).
           | 
           | Same goes for the default search engine for
           | browsers/operating systems ... etc.
           | 
           | I will absolutely be firing off queries to google and
           | GPTSearch in parallel and doing a quick comparison between
           | the two. I am especially curious to see how well queries like
           | "I need the PCI-e 4 10-gig SFP+ card that is best supported /
           | most popular with the /r/homelab community" goes. Google
           | struggles to do anything other than link to forums where
           | people are already asking similar questions.
        
         | 7thpower wrote:
         | I have learned to seriously question my instincts on when
         | something is too late as there are many niches to fill and this
         | is likely a building block for broader functionality.
         | 
         | That being said, for all the talk about how bad google has
         | become, I still prefer it to an unbroken bing.
        
         | joshdavham wrote:
         | > excited to see what they cook
         | 
         | Me too! I've really started to dislike Google search recently
         | and am super excited we now have more viable options!
        
       | nextworddev wrote:
       | I have turned bearish on Perplexity recently, this confirms it
        
         | marban wrote:
         | Perplexity was a cult in the first place.
        
           | beng-nl wrote:
           | I'm surprised at all the negativity on perplexity. I think
           | it's a great approach (base answers on sources) and their
           | product seems to deliver on the premise.
           | 
           | That said, anecdotally, I find it's a bit hit-miss: if it's
           | hit it's a huge improvement over google (and a minor
           | improvement over chatgpt), if it's miss it's still good but
           | get the feeling you won't get anywhere further by asking more
           | questions.
        
         | keiferski wrote:
         | Perplexity is a really terrible name for a product and that
         | alone will hold it back from being a real competitor.
        
           | Me1000 wrote:
           | It's not like ChatGPT (or ChatGTP as half of people call it)
           | is much better.
        
             | keiferski wrote:
             | ChatGPT isn't a great name, but it's easy to say, spell,
             | and remember. And at this point, a lot of people just know
             | them as OpenAI, which is a great name.
             | 
             | Perplexity sounds like a parody startup name from the
             | Silicon Valley TV show. Way too complicated and unnatural.
        
               | skybrian wrote:
               | You're saying that now, but getting the initials in
               | "ChatGPT" in the right order took a while to learn, so I
               | wouldn't say it's easy to remember, and it seems easy to
               | stumble saying it, too?
               | 
               | It's all about familiarity. Once people learn it, it's
               | not hard.
        
               | keiferski wrote:
               | But it didn't matter if they were in order or not,
               | because ChatPTG or ChatTGP all go to the same place via
               | Google, etc. It could have been called Chat + [Any 3
               | characters] and been fine.
               | 
               | Perplexity is just a nonsensical word (for those
               | unfamiliar with the concept) that is too long and hard to
               | spell. They'd be better off just chopping it down to
               | Lexity, or Lex, or Plexity, or Plex, etc.
        
               | SG- wrote:
               | in French it translates to ChatFart when you read it out
               | loud.
        
             | DrBenCarson wrote:
             | It became a good name once it became a watershed viral
             | phenomenon. Everything being equal yeah not a great name
             | but it defined a new hype cycle so it got a pass
        
             | woadwarrior01 wrote:
             | ChatGTP and other variants with a Levenshtein distance of 1
             | from ChatGPT have been typosquatted to death by
             | subscriptionware wrappers on the App Store and the Play
             | Store. Many of them seem to be quite successful.
        
           | soheil wrote:
           | Agreed, it's as if someone completely ignored the meaning of
           | the word and just decided what sounds good for an AI app.
        
           | woadwarrior01 wrote:
           | I've always thought that the name is very ironic and perhaps
           | "certitude" would've been a better name.
        
           | currymj wrote:
           | A good language model is one with low perplexity.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity
           | 
           | Reasonable name for a language model startup.
        
             | keiferski wrote:
             | It would be a logical name if its customers were
             | technicians familiar with LLMs, and not end businesses and
             | consumers. Which is why Ford wasn't named Internal
             | Combustion Engine, Apple wasn't named Graphics Processing
             | Unit, etc.
        
               | currymj wrote:
               | Generative Pretrained Transformer is also a terrible
               | brand name but it doesn't seem to matter.
        
               | keiferski wrote:
               | Because the name isn't Generative Pretrained Transformer,
               | it's GPT.
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | Perplexity sounds no weirder to me for a tech product
               | than than Google or Yahoo or Apple.
        
             | stocknoob wrote:
             | Would False Positive be a good name for a medical screening
             | service?
        
           | toephu2 wrote:
           | Same with 'Claude 3.5 Sonnet'.
           | 
           | At first I thought it was some piano piece like "Mazurkas,
           | Op. 59" by Chopin, or had something to do with some French
           | guy in the AI field.
        
         | forbiddenvoid wrote:
         | It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that Perplexity wasn't
         | the product I needed. I'm not sure this is either, but we'll
         | try it out just the same.
        
           | yungtriggz wrote:
           | @forbiddenvoid what is the product you need?
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | It's clear as to where Perplexity is eventually is going, and
         | it will likely get acquired by Amazon. Here's why: [0]
         | 
         | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121821
        
           | nextworddev wrote:
           | One thing about Amazon is that I have never seen them overpay
           | for an acquisition (as in they really penny pinch and
           | negotiate hard). So Perplexity's high price tag may turn
           | Amazon off
        
         | joshdavham wrote:
         | I actually like Perplexity a lot. It's really good for doing
         | research. But if this new chatGPT search thing is better, I'm
         | gonna switch.
        
         | veber-alex wrote:
         | I have been using Perplexity with the AI engine set to Claude
         | 3.5 Sonnet for a month now, mostly for programming related
         | questions, and it has been amazing. I mostly stopped using
         | google.
        
           | speckx wrote:
           | I do the same but with Kagi.
        
       | SethMLarson wrote:
       | Hah, OpenAI is becoming an ads business too. So much for
       | something new, same old funding model for every centralized
       | platform on the web.
        
         | troymc wrote:
         | OpenAI has ads? I thought it was mostly a freemium business
         | model.
        
           | SethMLarson wrote:
           | I'm saying that by moving towards explicit "search" and
           | "linking to sources" they have set the stage for being able
           | to charge to be recommended by their search features (ie, ads
           | and pay-to-rank, same as Google search).
           | 
           | There aren't any ads in their demo, we haven't seen the real
           | deal yet, but I'll be watching HN for that day.
        
             | soheil wrote:
             | Why, just because search has ads therefore anything that is
             | a superset of that must also?
        
               | littlestymaar wrote:
               | Over the past two decades, ads have proven to be the only
               | way to make money over the internet...
        
               | ascorbic wrote:
               | They're making $300 million per month in revenue right
               | now, with no ads.
        
               | croes wrote:
               | Because ads bring money and companies love money
        
         | breck wrote:
         | If they are making billions from subscriptions, why on earth
         | would they want to switch to an ads business?
        
           | RodgerTheGreat wrote:
           | Might have something to do with the fact that they're also
           | still _losing_ billions operating their services at a loss!
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | Seems like the sane thing to do with would be put ads on
             | those using the service for free.
        
           | SethMLarson wrote:
           | Making billions but spending trillions for no moat (GPUs and
           | models aren't moats) means that the only moat they have are
           | users. Users aren't paying enough to offset costs, the only
           | way to get value from non-subscription users for their scale
           | is through ads.
        
           | soheil wrote:
           | Slightly more accurate: they're raising billions making
           | pennies.
        
           | short_sells_poo wrote:
           | Because it is never enough. We see this time and time again.
           | Once they are making billions, the people in charge will
           | demand that they start making dozens of billions, and then
           | hundreds. The growth must never cease, because the moment you
           | stop growing, you can't sell the dream that supports
           | ridiculous PE ratios anymore.
           | 
           | Google was a very profitable business 10 years ago and the
           | search was still decent. In the last decade they absolutely
           | butchered their core product (and the internet along with it)
           | in an effort to squeeze more ad dollars out, because it's not
           | the level of profitability that they need to maintain, but
           | the growth of that profitability.
           | 
           | Microsoft was a ridiculously profitable company, but that is
           | not enough, they must show growth. So they add increasingly
           | user hostile features to their core product because the
           | current crop of management needs to see geometric growth
           | during their 5 year tenure. And then in 5 years, the next
           | crop of goobers will need to show geometric growth as well to
           | justify their bonuses.
           | 
           | Think about this for a moment: the entire ecosystem is built
           | on the (entirely preposterous) premise that there must be
           | constant geometric growth. Nobody needs to make a decision or
           | even accept that this is long term sustainable, every
           | participant just wants the system to keep doing this during
           | their particular 5-10 year tenure.
           | 
           | It's an interesting showcase of essentially an evolutionary
           | algorithm/swarm optimizer falling into a local optimum while
           | a much better global optimum is out of reach because the real
           | world is something like a Rastrigin function with copious
           | amounts of noise with an unknowable but fat tailed
           | distribution.
           | 
           | <rant/> by a hedge fund professional.
        
             | breck wrote:
             | This is such a good rant, and I think you should develop it
             | into an essay and I think there is an important catchy
             | natural equation to mine here.
        
             | drilbo wrote:
             | >It's an interesting showcase of essentially an
             | evolutionary algorithm/swarm optimizer falling into a local
             | optimum while a much better global optimum is out of reach
             | because the real world is something like a Rastrigin
             | function with copious amounts of noise with an unknowable
             | but fat tailed distribution.
             | 
             | I've never heard it framed like this before, that's
             | beautiful.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | To make more billions
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | * to lose lose less billions [1].
             | 
             | [1] https://www.thestack.technology/microsoft-earnings-
             | openai/
        
           | jajko wrote:
           | You can ask the same for ie Apple where you pay a proper
           | premium for products, yet their ad business keeps growing
           | slowly into respectable proportions, and not by accident.
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | they're not making billions from subscriptions
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | They get inspired by streaming services doing the same.
        
           | stocknoob wrote:
           | Switch? Por que no los dos?
        
       | Xcelerate wrote:
       | How long until advertisements are subtly introduced? I didn't
       | notice any specific brand of limoncello recommended in their
       | demo.
        
         | findthewords wrote:
         | I hope very quickly. The sooner they start competing with
         | Google for ads the better.
        
           | solfox wrote:
           | Are ads what people want?
        
             | gk1 wrote:
             | People want whatever they searched for. If the ads provide
             | that, then sure. That's why Google and Meta are the size
             | that they are...
        
               | croes wrote:
               | Most of the time I don't search for products so there is
               | nothing I want to buy.
        
               | sundaeofshock wrote:
               | Google is the size it is due to monopoly power.
        
               | goatlover wrote:
               | I don't want ads when I search.
        
             | kaonwarb wrote:
             | I don't want ads. But I can't deny that ads are the only
             | business model with a chance of scaling to compete with
             | Google.
             | 
             | If that's what they want to do in this space, which is not
             | a given.
        
             | boweruk wrote:
             | No but once ChatGPT starts threatening Google's revenue
             | model, maybe they will start putting effort into improving
             | their drastically deteriorating search engine.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | they need to win search share to threaten Google's
               | revenue model: take traffic from google.com, so google
               | will sell ads. Going to ads busyness is not necessary for
               | this.
        
               | Teever wrote:
               | But why is that good for me?
               | 
               | Why do I care if Google succeeds or dies?
               | 
               | If anything I want them to die for ad infested they've
               | made the internet. I don't want ads in either chatGPT or
               | Google Search.
        
             | moralestapia wrote:
             | Plenty of times the answer is yes.
        
         | TZubiri wrote:
         | 5 to 10 years
        
         | BiteCode_dev wrote:
         | Honestly, if I can disable ads by paying them, then I'm ok with
         | it.
         | 
         | Google will suck all your data even if you pay, and link the
         | entire earth of services to your identity.
         | 
         | For now, chatgpt doesn't care, and I already pay for what they
         | provide.
         | 
         | May they kill Google.
         | 
         | 20 years old me would freak out hearing me that, they used to
         | be my heroes.
        
           | entropicdrifter wrote:
           | You either die a hero or _mumble mumble_
        
           | zelphirkalt wrote:
           | You are thinking you can pay them to not use your data? Think
           | again. They will sneakily use your data anyway. If not yours,
           | then the data of people who do not change setting xyz. Oops,
           | the last update must have reset that option for some users.
        
           | swatcoder wrote:
           | > Honestly, if I can disable ads by paying them, then I'm ok
           | with it.
           | 
           | The modern maxim is: _any content platform large enough to
           | host an ad sales department will sell ads_
           | 
           | Vanishingly few (valuable) consumers have zero tolerance for
           | ads, so not selling ads means leaving huge sums of money on
           | the table once you get to a certain scale. Large
           | organizations have demonstrated that they can't resist that
           | opportunity.
           | 
           | The road out is to either convince everyone to have zero
           | tolerance for ads (good luck), to just personally opt for
           | disperse, smaller vendors that distinguish themselves in a
           | niche by not indulging, or to just support and use
           | adversarial ad blockers in order to take personal control.
           | Hoping that the next behemoth that everybody wants to use
           | will protect you from ads is a non-starter. Sooner or later,
           | they're going to take your money _and_ serve you ads, just
           | like the others.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | You can pay to get fewer ads
        
           | arcticbull wrote:
           | So the issue is if you let people opt out by paying you're
           | left with a low intent, likely lower net worth group of
           | people to advertise to. As a result those eyeballs are worth
           | less. The advertisers will turn to other platforms if you
           | only let the worst people see their ads.
           | 
           | Unless enough people all pay, the whole thing stops working.
           | But there aren't enough people who will pay because most
           | people don't care.
           | 
           | Tldr: the ad supported business model fundamentally doesn't
           | work if you let all your best products (you) opt out by
           | paying. It requires them to pay an amount far in excess of
           | what they would be willing to pay for the system to work.
        
             | spearman wrote:
             | There's some truth to that, but Netflix, YouTube, etc seem
             | to be OK with both ad-supported and paid ad-free versions,
             | so I think the logic you described does not always dominate
             | the considerations.
        
               | arcticbull wrote:
               | I think you're right that it's not universal - maybe
               | something to do with medium and attention?
        
           | drilbo wrote:
           | They're definitely still using your data though
        
         | nuz wrote:
         | It's already happened in a subtle way via who got to partner
         | with them to be displayed in results vs not.
        
         | schmidtleonard wrote:
         | 2 years for ads, 6 years to remove the yellow background.
        
           | M4v3R wrote:
           | I think you're being _very_ generous with these 2 years.
        
             | schmidtleonard wrote:
             | Yeah, I suppose OpenAI also speedran the "make noble
             | promises to not become evil / become evil" pipeline too.
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | Probably not long, some users already got A/B'ed into testing
         | "sponsored results"
         | 
         | https://i.imgur.com/UpAptFL.png
        
           | FriedPickles wrote:
           | The response on the left references specific products, but
           | where's the evidence that it's sponsored?
        
             | alwa wrote:
             | Aside from the marketing-ish tone and specific deeplinks to
             | product purchase pages, the prominent Amazon logo and
             | product description headline implied some degree of
             | affiliation to my eyes. It seems like the evidence is that
             | it would be foolish not to take the money for presenting
             | such an obvious referral of a motivated buyer.
             | 
             | Frankly the example they posted seems like a fairly happy
             | one, where the user is explicitly implying that they're
             | seeking a specific physical product to introduce to their
             | life. We've all seen where those monetization incentives
             | lead over time though.
             | 
             | But you're right--not even so much as a tiny word "Ad" like
             | Google does...
        
               | citizenpaul wrote:
               | It could just be affiliate links? Wow billions of dollars
               | poured into AI so it can serve up referral links. A
               | boring dystopia indeed.
        
         | littlestymaar wrote:
         | Not long before it's forbidden by law with rules like "if you
         | say the name of one brand, you must name at least two
         | competitors" I suspect.
        
           | KeplerBoy wrote:
           | That'll be the European version.
        
             | littlestymaar wrote:
             | Don't Americans also have rules about hidden advertising
             | like that in regular media?
        
               | tiahura wrote:
               | American law generally favors freedom of expression.
        
               | arcticbull wrote:
               | There are several classes of restrictions on free speech
               | in the US. These include: obscenity, fraud, speech
               | integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent
               | lawless action, speech that violates intellectual
               | property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and
               | --- most relevant here --- commercial speech such as
               | advertising.
               | 
               | Advertising has far less protection than is ordinarily
               | afforded to the kind of speech you might do as a person.
        
               | bandrami wrote:
               | The American model prefers "sponsored material should be
               | identified as such" though that's only active for
               | broadcasting currently
        
         | josefritzishere wrote:
         | They might wait a whole week.
        
         | breck wrote:
         | Why would they ever want to sell ads?
         | 
         | They did not get addicted to selling ads, have billions in
         | revenue from paying subscribers, and don't have to wean
         | themselves off of ads (as Google and Meta would love to do).
        
           | 23B1 wrote:
           | Because Sam Altman needs to buy another Greubel Forsey, of
           | course.
        
           | kredd wrote:
           | Why make $1 when you can make $100?
        
           | disgruntledphd2 wrote:
           | Because they are massively structurally unprofitable right
           | now?
        
         | axus wrote:
         | I'd be happy to have another Google clone, that doesn't have a
         | login and is not a chat session. Go to https://search.ai , type
         | my search query and look through the results, with ads on the
         | side.
        
         | tomjen3 wrote:
         | It is much more expensive to run a search query with AI. I
         | don't think ads can pay for it.
        
       | typon wrote:
       | Asked it to generate code for a library that was released in the
       | past year - GPT-4 couldn't do it and this one just did it
       | flawlessly. I am super impressed.
        
         | alanfranz wrote:
         | Hello bot. This is a search functionality not a new model.
        
           | typon wrote:
           | Maybe you don't understand how this works?
           | 
           | It's able to query the relevant documentation, put it in its
           | context and then use that to generate code. It's extremely
           | relevant to giving existing models superior functionality.
        
             | alanfranz wrote:
             | I haven't yet tried it yet. But that comment seemed
             | extremely vague and misleading.
        
         | RobinL wrote:
         | Same! (asking it to write code for the foss lib I maintain).
         | This is immediately very useful.
        
       | arromatic wrote:
       | Can it find obscure sites like marginalia does or personal blogs
       | posted in hn or it's just another bing + ai summarizer ?
        
         | ColinHayhurst wrote:
         | I asked for long tail blog posts about interesting places to
         | visit in Paris. I got one result; from an obscure website
         | called Vogue.
        
       | paul7986 wrote:
       | https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search (handy link to it)
        
         | bityard wrote:
         | That link just takes me to what looks like a normal chatgpt
         | prompt. (I tried asking it the same things they showed in the
         | article and I just get generic AI answers, not web search
         | results.)
        
           | DrBenCarson wrote:
           | Only available for Plus subscribers
        
           | bhy wrote:
           | Are you plus or team user and logged in? The link is to the
           | normal chatgpt prompt, but with the "Search" button enabled.
        
             | paul7986 wrote:
             | Im not logged into GPT (am subscribed for this month tho on
             | my iPhone but that's separate) and able to do a web search
             | and or ask GPT a question.
             | 
             | Actually i am logged into my iCloud on my macbook so guess
             | that's why im seeing the search on that device of mine (not
             | seeing on another where Im not logged into iCloud).
        
         | sunaookami wrote:
         | And https://chatgpt.com/?hints=search&q=%s if you want to add a
         | custom search engine to your browser
        
       | xnorswap wrote:
       | "Introducing" without actually just linking the search page.
       | 
       | That's not an introduction, that's a teaser trailer.
       | 
       | If they want this to be a viable search it needs to be available
       | quickly, and anonymously from something quick to type in.
       | 
       | Google would have been annoying as shit if you had to go to
       | google.com/search , let alone then log in.
        
         | posterman wrote:
         | I mean, until there is an alternative in the space that has a
         | (good), free, anonymous ai web search then I think we can
         | probably assume you are confusing what you want with what is
         | "viable"
        
         | solfox wrote:
         | It's available today for Plus users at chatgpt.com.
        
           | timeon wrote:
           | Using search with log-in is pretty big red flag for me.
        
       | PittleyDunkin wrote:
       | Is there any indication they're willing to improve on google in
       | terms of e.g. excluding commercial results? If not it's not clear
       | how this improves anything. Google has been excellent at semantic
       | search for a long time; the issue has been the lack of controls
       | to filter out the SEO bullshit and to remove the AI stuff from
       | the top and the right of the results. It's been way too easy to
       | game search with sufficient funding for well over a decade now
       | and the AI-generated crap is a long way from production-ready (in
       | terms of quality; obviously it generates _something_ ).
        
         | arromatic wrote:
         | Yeah . It needs to filter seo optimized articles first and
         | search more niche sites or it will be your average chat gpt
         | with search project from github.
        
       | zaptrem wrote:
       | Could OpenAI make it impossible for startups to try to build AI
       | search engines by signing all these paid agreements with
       | publishers?
        
       | soheil wrote:
       | I made one very similar it's basically a wrapper around
       | duckduckgo https://foxacid.ai
        
       | awb wrote:
       | LLMs have the chance to cannibalize the web and become the
       | primary interface for knowledge. But if websites remain the final
       | destination, it's good for content creators.
       | 
       | The only other way to kill the web without killing LLMs in the
       | process would be to create a way for people to upload structured
       | public content directly into an LLM's training. That would delay
       | public content into release batches unless training can be sped
       | up significantly.
        
         | nextworddev wrote:
         | "Way to put public content directly into an LLM training" -
         | sounds like Chatgpt
        
           | awb wrote:
           | I'm imagining LLMs might eventually have an upload tool,
           | similar to Google's site map upload, for registering content
           | proactively instead of needing to be discovered through
           | crawling the web or training on chat data.
        
       | some_furry wrote:
       | So glad that we're boiling the ocean for this.
        
         | JSDevOps wrote:
         | That's what I thought
        
       | shitter wrote:
       | I asked it the current weather in my area and the temperature was
       | off by 23 degrees F.
        
         | Maxion wrote:
         | What the hell did you ask it / what was the source? I just did
         | the same thing and it gave me the correct answer and used my
         | countries best known meteroligcal site?
        
           | shitter wrote:
           | It used good sources but appeared not to extract the
           | information correctly.
           | 
           | Repeating the same query in the same chat session gave me an
           | accurate answer.
        
       | phreeza wrote:
       | I gave it a quick spin and my initial impression is much worse
       | than perplexity.
        
       | grbsh wrote:
       | Is this more than just ChatGPT with search API resulted
       | concatenated the prompt?
       | 
       | It feels like it might be. It feels tasteful in the same way that
       | Apple ecosystem integrations just work really nicely and
       | intuitively. But then again, there is an art to keying and
       | retrieving embeddings, and it might just be that.
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | Makes me question why Google never bothered to create something
       | like search sessions which could be enriched with comments/notes
       | and would be located in a sidebar just like the chats in
       | ChatGPT/Claude/Mistral are.
       | 
       | They really had the potential to do something interesting, but
       | were just focused on their ad metrics with the "good enough"
       | search box. What have they been doing all the time?
        
         | zelphirkalt wrote:
         | Collecting people's data and making money from that.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | Google doesn't make money from "collecting people's data",
           | they show you ads.
           | 
           | If they're collecting data it doesn't even work; I make no
           | effort to hide from them and none of their ads are targeted
           | to me. Meta, though, they're good at it.
        
         | arromatic wrote:
         | Can you tell me a bit more ? What do you mean by search session
         | ?
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | Let's see, if I go to " [?] -> History -> Grouped History" on
           | the top right of the Chrome browser, I see a "Search History"
           | ( chrome://history/grouped ).
           | 
           | For example `8 hours ago: "autohotkey hotkeys"` with 4 links
           | to pages which I visited while searching.
           | 
           | But this is a Chrome feature, not a Google Search feature.
           | https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity does (sometimes?
           | can't see it right now) have a grouping feature of all the
           | searches made, but this is more of a search log than a search
           | management feature.
           | 
           | So chrome://history/grouped is the closest to what I mean,
           | but I can't pin or manage these history groups, enrich them
           | with comments or even files, like pdf's which could then get
           | stored in Google Drive, as well as get indexed for better
           | searches.
        
             | arromatic wrote:
             | oh I thought you meant something like commenting under
             | search result links like youtube videos.
             | 
             | I might be mistaken but i think ff mobile does something
             | similar of grouping search session
        
         | Liquix wrote:
         | the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years
         | [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate,
         | or make their search any better because they no longer play by
         | the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big
         | to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system.
         | 
         | [0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-
         | content/upl...
        
           | unnouinceput wrote:
           | OpenAI is Microsoft. Microsoft is a FAANG giant.
        
             | lucianbr wrote:
             | How is that relevant? Microsoft bought OpenAI, didn't
             | create it by R&D, so the assertion stands: giants don't do
             | new things, for whatever reason.
        
               | SideQuark wrote:
               | The amount of fundamental breakthroughs at places like
               | IBM, Bell, Xerox, all beg to differ with you.
               | 
               | In some fields of CS, places like MS research garner
               | nearly 50% of all top conference publications.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | Microsoft is literally not in "FAANG". But they are in
             | MANGA.
        
             | hidelooktropic wrote:
             | Microsoft is their leading investor. They don't technically
             | own OpenAI.
        
           | DSingularity wrote:
           | Not just surveillance. Power projection. I wonder what
           | impacts you can have on foreign economies by playing with
           | quality of these tech giants outputs?
        
           | scq wrote:
           | Linking the slide deck that caused Google to start encrypting
           | the traffic between their own data centers running on their
           | own fiber is perhaps not the most compelling argument that
           | Google is a state asset.
           | 
           | https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-
           | companies-s...
        
           | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
           | > they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,
           | 
           | And, yet, aside from Aramco, they are the most profitable
           | companies in the history of the world.
        
         | summerlight wrote:
         | I guess now Google's search stack is too complicated and not
         | many engineers understand what to do in order to introduce a
         | novel, big feature integrated into the full stack vertically
         | and horizontally. And those few capable of doing so are
         | probably completely out of bandwidth, so some random ambitious
         | PM cannot pull their hands into uncertain green field projects.
        
         | modeless wrote:
         | Chrome did add a sidebar that shows search sessions (queries
         | grouped with the pages you visited on that topic). Used to be
         | called "Journeys". I don't think you can add notes. I never
         | found it useful in the slightest and I doubt notes would have
         | made it any better. Chrome has been adding random UI features
         | like that over time, but I haven't found any of them at all
         | useful in many years.
        
       | wifipunk wrote:
       | Looks like they've also enabled advanced voice mode on the
       | windows desktop app.
       | 
       | Does not support search for anyone wondering.
        
       | illnewsthat wrote:
       | Looks like this was timed to coincide with Google adding search
       | grounding data to Gemini API:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42008834 //
       | https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-api-and-ai-studi...
        
         | 7thpower wrote:
         | They are taking a page out of Microsoft's strategy of clouding
         | out all sunlight.
        
       | jameshiew wrote:
       | The new web search icon appeared for me straightaway in the
       | ChatGPT macOS desktop app, within an in-progress conversation,
       | without even having to restart. Before I'd even seen this
       | official launch announcement. Very smooth!
        
       | og_kalu wrote:
       | """Search will be available at chatgpt.com (opens in a new
       | window), as well as on our desktop and mobile apps. All ChatGPT
       | Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will
       | have access today. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in
       | the next few weeks. We'll roll out to all Free users over the
       | coming months."""
       | 
       | Can confirm that free users who signed up for the waitlist can
       | use it right now (even if they didn't actually get in)
        
         | qwertox wrote:
         | Can confirm this as well. I switched to free around a month ago
         | and got access to this today. I did join the waitlist some
         | weeks ago.
        
         | rty32 wrote:
         | I signed up for the wait list as well and got the email.
         | However there is no search button on the web interface (free
         | tier). Is there anything I am missing?
        
       | grahamj wrote:
       | To my mind one of the great benefits of LLMS is the possibility
       | of searching without handing over some of the most personal
       | information that exists - your search history.
       | 
       | I'm happy OpenAI is advancing LLM-based search but I won't be
       | using it in earnest until it's local.
        
       | grbsh wrote:
       | How will this be gamed for neo-seo spam?
        
       | 7thpower wrote:
       | OpenAIs press release game is unreal. This totally overshadowed
       | Google's grounding release in my feeds.
        
       | cryptozeus wrote:
       | I would be surprised if this doesn't take share out of google's
       | pie
        
       | bagels wrote:
       | A new front has been opened in the SEO wars.
        
       | randcraw wrote:
       | I really don't see the value of summarizing/repackaging web
       | search hits. Given that 99% of SEO-tuned web content is just
       | shilling for vendors who don't want to be seen, LLM search
       | summarization will just repackage those ads into a more palatable
       | format that is LESS useful than the original, while more
       | successfully hiding the obvious signatures that used to be a
       | clear warning sign that...
       | THE.FOLLOWING.CONTENT.IS.MANIULATIVE.CRAP.
        
         | snakeyjake wrote:
         | People who think AI summarizations are useful suck at reading.
         | 
         | So they probably wouldn't notice the warning signs anyways.
        
         | arromatic wrote:
         | I think if they improve the algorithm maybe they can actually
         | present seo free results.
        
           | randcraw wrote:
           | You don't think SEO-LLMs will evolve to redirect search-LLMs
           | to 'see the world' the way the SEO-LLMs want it to? I foresee
           | SEO-LLM-brinkmanship as the inevitable outcome. Soon THIS
           | will be the catalyst for the real Skynet -- battling smart ad
           | engines.
        
             | arromatic wrote:
             | Only if openai is willing to play it . If they follow
             | google than seo-llm won't even exist because there will be
             | no need for it.
        
         | ghayes wrote:
         | I tend to agree. If I ask ChatGPT what is the best way to make
         | pasta, it will pull from every source it's ever been trained
         | on. If it decides to search the web, it will mostly cater to
         | one or two sources.
        
         | cloudking wrote:
         | I think the value here is not in searching for SEO crap, but
         | turning it on when you want to get references to the most
         | current information relevant to your query.
         | 
         | For example, if you ask LLMs to build code using the three.js
         | library, nearly all of them will reference version r128.
         | Presumably because that version has the largest representation
         | in the training data set. Now, you can turn this on and ask it
         | to reference the latest version, and it will search the web and
         | find r170 and the latest documentation to consider in it's
         | response.
         | 
         | I was already doing this before by adding "search the web for
         | the latest version first" in my prompts, now I can just click a
         | button. That's useful.
        
         | lawn wrote:
         | To me the kombination of Kagi's good search results with their
         | AI summarizer has been very useful.
         | 
         | Of course, layering an LLM on top of garbage will still produce
         | garbage.
        
       | holtkam2 wrote:
       | How is this different from RAG using a search API? I didn't get
       | their blurb about this being a standalone fine-tuned model.
        
       | blixt wrote:
       | One thing that is quite unfortunate with the state of SEO and the
       | web in general today is that when I asked "what are the latest
       | versions of common programming languages and when were they
       | released?" a large amount of the sources were "13 Tools You
       | Should Learn Now" and the like. This might be a solvable problem
       | within the search API they provide to the LLM, but for now I
       | wouldn't trust current LLMs to be able to filter out these
       | articles as less trustworthy than the official website of the
       | programming language in question.
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | Given how many of those SEO spam sites are themselves generated
         | by ChatGPT now, OpenAI can simply back-reference their own logs
         | to find out which sites are probably SEO spam while everyone
         | else is left guessing. That's vertical integration!
        
           | arromatic wrote:
           | If they do that , That's a genius idea.
        
             | code51 wrote:
             | So it'll turn to yet another arms race - similar to
             | captcha, cybersecurity and nuclear weapons. SEO will use AI
             | to fill in fluff inside AI-generated content (which is
             | already done).
             | 
             | It won't directly match ChatGPT logs and OpenAI would just
             | be pouring precious compute to a bottomless pit trying to
             | partial-match.
        
               | jerjerjer wrote:
               | Serve Claude-generated version to OpenAI bots. Serve
               | OpenAI-generated version to Claude bots. Problem solved.
               | 
               | Serve users a random version and A/B test along the way.
        
           | DSingularity wrote:
           | I'm sure they will be more subtle than that otherwise it will
           | get circumvented.
           | 
           | I'm sure they will/are tackling this at the model level.
           | Train them to both generate good completions while also
           | embedding text with good performance at separating generated
           | and human text.
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | Would someone even want to circumvent it though? Most sites
             | won't care very much about encouraging scrapers to include
             | them in LLM training data, it's not like you get paid.
        
           | itissid wrote:
           | Or offer two search results when they suspect one is spam and
           | see which one a user likes and train off of that, just the
           | way they do now with ChatGPT.
        
         | inhumantsar wrote:
         | this is why I pay for Kagi. granted those results still come
         | up, but you can block specific domains from ever appearing in
         | the results and configure how listicles are displayed.
        
           | speedgoose wrote:
           | As an alternative, ublacklist is free and open-source.
        
             | arromatic wrote:
             | Average serp page has 10 results . What if all 10 matches
             | with your blacklist ? Not to mention you can't do anything
             | if the engine dosen't search deeper .
        
               | speedgoose wrote:
               | You probably have to browse to the next page or refine
               | the search terms.
        
           | arromatic wrote:
           | How many can you block and filter manually ? 10 ? 100 ? 10k ?
           | Who will test sites for the blocklist ? The domain block
           | feature is great but unless it's collaborative listing it's
           | not gonna be super effective.
        
             | hughesjj wrote:
             | .... Test sites for the blocklist? What?
             | 
             | Also they do share the most blocked/raised/lowered etc
             | sites: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard
             | 
             | We've had this problem of "good defaults" before with ad
             | trackers blocking domains. I'm sure it'll be Sooner than
             | later when some community lists become popular and begin
             | being followed en mass
        
               | arromatic wrote:
               | I meant your average user can test a handful of sites if
               | they are seo spam or good sites but a single search
               | return 10+ results and even more when a user searches
               | multiple things , multiple times a day . Average user
               | doesn't have the time to test these many websites.
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | It's super effective for me because I just block stuff as
             | things pop up that I don't want. I've also added more
             | weight to certain domains that I want more results from. I
             | wouldn't want anyone touching my config, it's mine and it
             | works great!
        
             | speckx wrote:
             | 1,000
        
           | blharr wrote:
           | Kagi is admittedly pretty great for this.
        
         | benob wrote:
         | This is the next step for SEO: be able to game ChatGPT prompts
         | trying to filter out SEO crap...
        
           | joshdavham wrote:
           | How do you think people will try to game AI-based search?
        
         | ben_w wrote:
         | SEO spam is always going to focus on the biggest market, and by
         | doing so they can be completely transparent and obvious to
         | whoever they're not trying to fool.
         | 
         | I'd assume right now the SEO target is still mainly Google
         | rather than ChatGPT, but that's only an "I recon" not a
         | citation.
         | 
         | If and when ChatGPT does become the main target for SEO spam,
         | then Googling may start giving good results again.
        
           | adamc wrote:
           | Wouldn't it be "I reckon"? :-)
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | D'oh, yes. :)
        
         | hmottestad wrote:
         | For Java I got:
         | 
         | As of October 31, 2024, the latest version of Java is Java 23,
         | released on September 17, 2024. The most recent Long-Term
         | Support (LTS) version is Java 21, released on September 19,
         | 2023.
         | 
         | Which all seems correct and accurate.
        
           | andrewinardeer wrote:
           | This is because it is referencing and regurgitating Wikipedia
           | articles.
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | Nope. It had found an Oracle page for the LTS date and an
             | OpenJDK page for the latests version.
        
           | blixt wrote:
           | Yeah I did also find it to be mostly accurate. However,
           | seeing the sources I felt like I kind of have to check all
           | the languages just in case it picked up information from a
           | random "X ways to do Y" article that might not have been
           | prioritizing accuracy. And for this search query I did see
           | several languages' actual websites, but I did another very
           | similar query earlier where 9 out of 12 results were all
           | numbered list articles clearly intended for SEO. 2 of them
           | were actual official sites. And 1 was what appears to be a
           | decent attempt at talking about programming languages (i.e.
           | not SEO only).
        
         | notatoad wrote:
         | >what are the latest versions of common programming languages
         | and when were they released?
         | 
         | is this a real question you needed an answer to, or a
         | hypothetical you posed to test the quality of search results?
         | 
         |  _of course_ you 're going to get listicles for a query like
         | that, because it sounds like a query specifically chosen to
         | find low-quality listicles.
        
           | jerjerjer wrote:
           | I honestly doubt there exist an actual reputable resource
           | having it on a same page. Each language tracks their own
           | latest version(s). Wikipedia tracks latest versions for a
           | variety of software but it's on different pages.
        
         | skydhash wrote:
         | > _when I asked "what are the latest versions of common
         | programming languages and when were they released?"_
         | 
         | The issue is with the query itself. You're assuming that
         | there's some oracle that will understand your question and
         | surface the relevant information for you. Most likely, it will
         | use the word themselves as part of the query, which SEO sites
         | will exploit.
         | 
         | A more pragmatic search workflow would be to just search for
         | "most common programming languages used" [0], then used the
         | Wikipedia page to get the relevant information [1]. Much more
         | legwork, but with sources. And still quite fast.
         | 
         | [0]: (Screenshot) https://ibb.co/ggBLy8G
         | 
         | [1]: (Screenshot) https://ibb.co/H4g5bDf
        
         | sireat wrote:
         | This was a nice counterexample to other queries that seemed
         | quite decent.
         | 
         | I got:                 Programming Language Latest Version
         | Release Date       Python 3.12.0 October 2, 2024 ???!!!!!
         | Java SE 22 March 2024       JavaScript ECMAScript 2024 June
         | 2024       C++ C++23 December 2023       C# 12.0 September 2024
         | Ruby 3.3.0 December 25, 2023       PHP 8.3.0 November 2023
         | Swift 6.0 September 2024       Go 1.22 August 2024  !!!
         | Rust 1.75 October 2024 !!!!       Kotlin 2.0.0 May 21, 2024 !!!
         | 
         | This is pretty bad. (???!!! added by me)
         | 
         | However, my follow up query "Provide primary web page for each
         | language listed above" was quite decent:
         | 
         | Here are the primary websites for the programming languages
         | mentioned:                 Python: https://www.python.org/
         | Java: https://www.oracle.com/java/       JavaScript:
         | https://developer.mozilla.org/en-       US/docs/Web/JavaScript
         | C++: https://isocpp.org/       C#:
         | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/       Ruby:
         | https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/       PHP: https://www.php.net/
         | Swift: https://www.swift.org/       Go: https://go.dev/
         | Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/       Kotlin:
         | https://kotlinlang.org/
         | 
         | The problem was with the 3rd query "Provide latest version for
         | each language as mentioned on the primary website for that
         | language."
         | 
         | That brought back the first result basically unchanged.
         | 
         | So certainly this is a work in progress but very promising.
        
       | pvo50555 wrote:
       | Axel Springer! Now that's high-quality news sources...
        
       | vzaliva wrote:
       | If there is a way to add it as search engine to Firefox?
        
       | GavCo wrote:
       | "The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained
       | using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including
       | distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview."
       | 
       | More info on model distillation: https://openai.com/index/api-
       | model-distillation/
        
       | wiremine wrote:
       | I played around with it a bit, here are some hot takes.
       | 
       | For context, I first tried this procession of searches on the Mac
       | OS app.
       | 
       | 1. "Who won the world series" 2. Who was the MVP?" 3. "Give me
       | his bio"
       | 
       | My observations:
       | 
       | 1. UX: The "search" button feels oddly placed, but I can't put my
       | finger on it. But once I got it is a toggle, it wasn't a bit
       | deal.
       | 
       | 2. The first result had 3 logos, headlines and timestamps
       | delineated, and easy to ready. The second one and third ones
       | included a "Sources" button that opened a fly open menu. Clicking
       | those opened a web link. The third result also included images in
       | the fly open.
       | 
       | 3. Citations were also inlined. The third result, for the bio,
       | included a citation per paragraph.
       | 
       | 4. It wasn't as fast as google. Which makes sense, given it's
       | going through the LLM. But it will take a while to rewire my
       | brain to expect slower responses to search.
       | 
       | 5. Overall, I found the chat interface a very intuitive
       | interface.
       | 
       | The second search I asked was "Give me a plan for a Thanksgiving
       | meal."
       | 
       | I to a long response that felt like a weird mashup of LLM-
       | generated content and search results:
       | 
       | 1. A list of menu selections
       | 
       | 2. Links to some recipes
       | 
       | 3. Prepration timeline
       | 
       | 4. Shopping list
       | 
       | 5. Additional tips
       | 
       | There were 15 citations listed in the popup button, but only 3
       | inlined.
       | 
       | This was... not great. A traditional list of search results feels
       | better here.
       | 
       | Overall, I like the direction. Innovation in search has been dead
       | for close to 10 years, and this feels like I'd use it for certain
       | inquiries.
        
       | jdulay19 wrote:
       | I wonder how long until it will offer reverse image search, too.
        
       | taco_emoji wrote:
       | whatever
        
       | EcommerceFlow wrote:
       | I wonder if this is their own web scraper, or if they're using
       | Bing API?
       | 
       | As a very experienced SEO, this is pretty exciting nonetheless, a
       | new front in the online war opening up.
       | 
       | If they're using their own scraper/search algorithms, it'll be
       | interesting to see how they weigh the winners and losers compared
       | to how Google does it.
        
       | niam wrote:
       | Genuine question: is there a present or planned value proposition
       | for people like me who already have decent search skills? Or are
       | these really for children/elders who (without making any
       | normative claim about whether this is a good thing or not) can't
       | be arsed to perform searches themselves?
       | 
       | Does someone else have good search skills but mingle traditional
       | search engines with LLMs anyways? Why?
       | 
       | I use LLMs every day but wouldn't trust one to perform searches
       | for me yet. I feel like you have to type more for a result that's
       | slower and wordier, and that might stop early when it amasses
       | what it _thinks_ are answers from low effort SEO farms.
        
         | lighthazard wrote:
         | LLMs really make it easy to quickly find documentation for me.
         | Across a huge software project like Mediawiki with so much
         | legacy and caveats, having an LLM parse the docs and give me
         | specific information without me hoping that someone at
         | Stackoverflow did it or if I'm lucky enough to stumble across
         | what I was looking for.
        
         | hughesjj wrote:
         | I think it's more filling the niche that Google's self
         | immolation in the name of ad revenue started. Besides kagi,
         | there aren't really any solid search engines today (even ddg),
         | and OpenAI has a reach way beyond kagi could dream of outside a
         | billion dollars in marketing.
        
         | Willamin wrote:
         | I find myself being unable to search for more complex subjects
         | when I don't know the keywords, specialized terminology, or
         | even the title of a work, yet I have a broad understanding of
         | what I'd like to find. Traditional search engines (I'll jump
         | between Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and Google) haven't proved as useful
         | at pointing me in the right direction when I find that I need
         | to spend a few sentences describing what I'm looking for.
         | 
         | LLMs on the other hand (free ChatGPT is the only one I've used
         | for this, not sure which models) give me an opportunity to
         | describe in detail what I'm looking for, and I can provide
         | extra context if the LLM doesn't immediately give me an answer.
         | Given LLM's propensity for hallucinations, I don't take its
         | answers as solid truth, but I'll use the keywords, terms, and
         | phrases in what it gives me to leverage traditional search
         | engines to find a more authoritative source of information.
         | 
         | ---
         | 
         | Separately, I'll also use LLMs to search for what I suspect is
         | obscure-enough knowledge that it would prove difficult to wade
         | through more popular sites in traditional search engine results
         | pages.
        
           | Lws803 wrote:
           | You might like what we're building in that sense :D (full
           | disclosure, I'm the founder of Beloga). We're building a new
           | way for search with programmable knowledge. You're
           | essentially able to call on search from Google, Perplexity
           | other search engines by specifying them as @ mentions
           | together with your detailed query.
        
           | erosivesoul wrote:
           | I also find some use for this. Or I often ask if there's a
           | specific term for a thing that I only know generally, which
           | usually yields better search results, especially for obscure
           | science and technology things. The newer GPTs are also decent
           | at math, but I still use Wolfram Alpha for most of that stuff
           | just because I don't have to double check it for
           | hallucinations.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | > I find myself being unable to search for more complex
           | subjects when I don't know the keywords, specialized
           | terminology, or even the title of a work, yet I have a broad
           | understanding of what I'd like to find.
           | 
           | For me this is typically a multi-step process. The results of
           | a first search give me more ideas of terms to search for, and
           | after some iteration I usually find the right terms. It's a
           | bit of an art to search for content that maybe isn't your end
           | goal, but will help you search for what you actually seek.
           | 
           | LLMs can be useful for that first step, but I always revert
           | to Google for the final search.
           | 
           | Also, Google Verbatim search is essential.
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | Genuine answer: this was not made for you. There is a billion-
         | to-trillion dollar addressable market, which you're not a part
         | of. It was made for them.
        
         | blixt wrote:
         | What I really hope this helps solve is covering for the huge
         | lag in knowledge cutoff. A recent example is where it went "oh
         | you're using Go 1.23 which doesn't exist so that's clearly the
         | problem in your Dockerfile, let me fix that".
         | 
         | But I'm not keeping my hopes up, I doubt the model has been
         | explicitly fine-tuned to double check its embedded knowledge of
         | these types of facts, and conversely it probably hasn't even
         | been successfully fine-tuned to only search when it truly
         | doesn't know something (i.e. it will probably search in cases
         | where it could've just answered without the search). At least
         | the behavior I'm seeing now from some 15 minutes of testing
         | indicates this, but time will tell.
        
           | ascorbic wrote:
           | I asked it about the UK government budget which was announced
           | a few hours ago and it gave me a good, accurate summary.
        
         | carlesfe wrote:
         | I think this is just the first step for a full-featured agent
         | that not only does searches for you, but also executes whatever
         | was your goal (e.g. a restaurant reservation, etc)
        
           | adamc wrote:
           | To solve that problem you have to solve all the issues that
           | make me not trust the results. As search, it's fine, since I
           | am perusing and evaluating them. But as an agent,
           | hallucinations and inaccurate answers have to disappear (or
           | very close to disappear).
        
         | adamc wrote:
         | I dunno, I'm not exactly on the AI bandwagon, but search is the
         | one place where I use (and see others using) chatgpt all the
         | time. The fact that Google search has been getting worse for a
         | decade probably helps, but better search -- consistently done,
         | without ads or cruft -- would be worth a few bucks every month
         | for me.
         | 
         | I agree that you can't TRUST them, but half the links regular
         | search turns up are also garbage, so that's not really worse,
         | per se.
        
           | davidee wrote:
           | Same, but, until recently, I've been using Microsoft's Co-
           | Pilot because for the longest time it did exactly what this
           | new "search" feature added to ChatGPT: it produced a list of
           | source material and links to reference the LLM's output
           | against. It was often instrumental for me and I did begin to
           | use it as a search engine considering how polluted a lot of
           | first-search results have become with spam and empty,
           | generated content.
           | 
           | Oddly, Microsoft recently changed the search version of
           | Copilot to remove all the links to source material. Now it's
           | like talking to an annoying growth-stage-startup middle
           | manager in every way, including the inability to back up
           | their assertions and a propensity to use phrases like
           | "anyway, let's try to keep things moving".
           | 
           | Happy to see this feature set added into ChatGPT -
           | particularly when I'm looking for academic research in/on a
           | subject I'm not familiar with.
        
         | sebzim4500 wrote:
         | Even if you are good at writing the queries, Google is so
         | terrible that you end up getting some blogspam etc. in there
         | (or at least I do). A model filtering that out is useful, which
         | I find phind pretty good for. Hopefully this will be even
         | better.
        
         | spunker540 wrote:
         | I think it's pretty clear that LLMs can process a
         | document/article/web page faster than any human in order to
         | answer a given question. (And it can be parallelized across
         | multiple pages at once too).
         | 
         | The main hard part of searching isn't formulating queries to
         | write in the Google search bar, it's clicking on links, and
         | reading/skimming until you find the specific answer you want.
         | 
         | Getting one sentence direct answers is a much superior UX
         | compared to getting 10 links you have to read through yourself.
        
           | tempusalaria wrote:
           | Only if it is reliably correct.
           | 
           | Google does offer an AI summary for factual searches and I
           | ignore it as it often hallucinates. Perplexity has the same
           | problem. OpenAI would need to solve that for this to be truly
           | useful
        
             | Lws803 wrote:
             | Agreed, hallucinations can be pretty bad and can hurt trust
             | a great deal.
        
             | vel0city wrote:
             | This is why my most used LLM after code suggestions is
             | Bing. I like that it has lots of references for the things
             | I ask it to double check and read more, but at the same
             | time it can help me dig deeper into a subject rapidly and
             | better formulate the exact question I'm trying to ask and
             | give me a link to the actual data it's getting it's info
             | from.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | IME Google's summary is not actually hallucinating, the
             | problem is they are forcing it to quote the search results,
             | but they're surfacing bad/irrelevant search results because
             | Google's actual search hasn't worked in years. It's a RAG
             | failure.
             | 
             | For instance I searched for the number to dial to set call
             | forwarding on carrier X the other day, and it gave wrong
             | results because it returned carrier Y.
        
           | lottin wrote:
           | > Getting one sentence direct answers is a much superior UX
           | compared to getting 10 links you have to read through
           | yourself.
           | 
           | If we assume that people want a 'direct answer', then of
           | course a direct answer is better. But maybe some of us don't
           | want a 'direct answer'? I want to know who's saying what, and
           | in which context, so I can draw my own conclusions.
        
         | paul7986 wrote:
         | I use GPT for things that would require multiple Google
         | searches (research). Some examples..
         | 
         | - I count calories... eat out always and at somewhat healthy
         | chains (Cava, Chipolte, etc). Tell GPT (via voice while driving
         | to & or after eating) what ive eaten half the day at those
         | places and then later for dinner. It calculates a calorie count
         | estimation for half the day and then later at dinner the
         | remaining. I have checked to see if GPT is getting the right
         | calories for things off websites and it has.
         | 
         | - Have hiking friends who live an hour or two hours away and we
         | hike once a month an hour or less drive is where we meet up and
         | hike at a new place. GPT suggests such hikes and quickly (use
         | to take many searches on Google to do such). Our drives to
         | these new hikes learned from GPT have always been under an
         | hour.
         | 
         | So far the information with those examples has been accurate.
         | Always enjoy hearing how others use LLMs... what research are
         | you getting done in one or two queries which used to take MANY
         | google searches?
        
           | timeon wrote:
           | With eating out so much, try to ask it about sodium intake as
           | well.
        
             | paul7986 wrote:
             | yeah that is somewhat of a concern and have asked GPT that
             | info / to calculate that too (though only a few times).
        
           | kjellsbells wrote:
           | GPT is proving useful for me where something is well
           | _documented_ , but not well _explained_.
           | 
           | Case in point: Visual Basic for Applications (the Excel macro
           | language). This language has a broad pool of reference
           | material and of Stack Overflow answers. It doesnt have a lot
           | of good explicatory material because the early 2000s Internet
           | material is aging out, being deleted as people retire or lose
           | interest, etc.
           | 
           | (To be frank, Microsoft would like nothing more than to kill
           | this off completely, but VBA exists and is insanely more
           | powerful than the current alternatives, so it lives on.)
        
         | tempest_ wrote:
         | I think you need to define "decent search skills" since google
         | will straight up ignore most boolean stuff or return ads.
         | 
         | The LLMs are nice because they are not yet enshitified to the
         | point of uselessness.
        
         | carabiner wrote:
         | > Genuine question...
         | 
         | When it starts with this you KNOW it's going to be maximum bad
         | faith horsefuckery in the rest of the "question."
        
           | niam wrote:
           | I know what you mean, but also don't know how it applies
           | here. Not a hater, and not asking rhetorically to dunk on
           | OpenAI. Just haven't found a use for this particular feature.
           | 
           | Which is _also_ exactly something a bad-faith commenter would
           | say, but if I lose either way, I 'd rather just ask the
           | question -\\_(tsu)_/-
        
             | jdgoesmarching wrote:
             | You're not doing a great job of not rhetorically dunking on
             | OpenAI when you imply that it must be for children, elders,
             | or people who can't be arsed to search.
             | 
             | The comment was dripping with condescension towards the use
             | of LLM search, and that's coming from a huge OpenAI
             | skeptic.
        
         | jakub_g wrote:
         | I don't overuse LLMs for now; however when I have a complex
         | problem that would require multiple of searches and dozens of
         | tabs opened and reading through very long docs, asking LLM
         | allows me to iterate order of magnitude faster.
         | 
         | Things that were previously "log a jira and think about it when
         | I have a full uninterrupted day" now can be approached with
         | half an hour spare. This is game changer because "have a full
         | day uninterrupted" almost never happens.
         | 
         | It's like having a very senior coworker who knows a lot of
         | stuff and booking a 30m meeting to brainstorm with them and
         | quickly reject useless paths vs dig more into promising ones,
         | vs. sitting all day researching on your own.
         | 
         | The ideas simply flow much faster with this approach.
         | 
         | I use it to get a high level familiarity with what's likely
         | possible vs what's not, and then confirm with normal search.
         | 
         | I use LLMs also for non-work things like getting high level
         | understanding of taxation, inheritance etc laws in a country I
         | moved in, to get some starting point for further research.
        
           | itissid wrote:
           | This. Not having to open two dozen tabs and read through so
           | much is a gamechanger, especially for someone who has had
           | trouble focusing with so much open. This is especially true
           | when learning a new technology.
        
         | pflenker wrote:
         | I find that my search skills matter less and less because
         | search engines try to be smarter than me. Increasingly I am
         | confronted with largely unrelated results (taking tweaked
         | keywords or synonyms to my query as input apparently) as
         | opposed to no results. So my conclusion is that the search
         | engines increasingly see the need of search skills as an anti
         | pattern they actively want to get rid of.
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | On the Google search results page, activate Search tools >
           | All results > Verbatim. You can also create your own search
           | provider bookmark with verbatim search as the default by
           | adding "tbs:li=1" as a query parameter to the Google search
           | URL.
        
           | jdgoesmarching wrote:
           | Completely agreed. At a certain point, "skills" became
           | fighting a losing battle with Google incessantly pushing me
           | towards whatever KPIs or ads they're chasing. It's a poor use
           | of my effort and time to keep chasing what Google used to be.
        
         | melenaboija wrote:
         | Any question that few months ago I would do to stackexchange
         | (or expect and answer from, after a google seqrch) either
         | coding or quantitative, I go to chat gpt now.
         | 
         | I consider myself quite anti LLM hype and I have to admit it
         | has been working amazingly good for me.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | For searches that remain inconclusive, I sometimes double-check
         | with LLMs to see if I have missed anything. It rarely gives
         | relevant new insights, but it's good to get the confirmation I
         | guess.
        
         | photochemsyn wrote:
         | It seems good at finding relevant research papers. e.g.
         | 
         | > "Can you provide a list of the ten most important recent
         | publications related to high-temperature helium-cooled pebble-
         | bed reactors and the specific characteristics of their graphite
         | pebble fuel which address past problems in fuel disintegration
         | and dust generation?"
         | 
         | These were more focused and relevant results than a Google
         | Scholar keyword-style search.
         | 
         | However, it did rather poorly when asked for direct links to
         | the documentation for a set of Python libraries. Gave some junk
         | links or just failed entirely in 3/4 of the cases.
        
         | kadomony wrote:
         | I was skeptical of LLM search until I saw Arc Search in action
         | with its "browse for me" functionality.
        
         | bigstrat2003 wrote:
         | The entire tech industry for the last decade (if not more) has
         | been aimed at people who can't be arsed to learn to use
         | computers properly. I would be _astonished_ if this time is
         | somehow different.
        
         | awongh wrote:
         | I use LLMs as a kind of search that is slightly less
         | structured. There are two broad cases:
         | 
         | 1) I know a little bit about something, but I need to be able
         | to look _up_ the knowledge tree for more context: `What are the
         | opposing viewpoints to Adam Smith 's thesis on economics?`
         | `Describe the different categories of compilers.`
         | 
         | 2) I have a very specific search in mind but it's in a domain
         | that has a lot of specific terminology that doesn't surface
         | easily in a google search unless you use that specific
         | terminology: `Name the different kinds of music chords and
         | explain each one.`
         | 
         | LLMs are great when a search engine would only surface
         | knowledge that's either too general or too specific and the
         | search engine can't tell the semantic difference between the
         | two.
         | 
         | Sometimes when I'm searching I need to be able to search at
         | different levels of understanding to move forward.
        
         | Lerc wrote:
         | I think the skills required will change but more in an
         | adaptation way rather than everything-you-knew-is-now-
         | irrelevant.
         | 
         | I feel like there is a mental architecture to searching where
         | you try and isolate aspects of what you are searching for that
         | are distinct within the broad category of similar but
         | irrelevant things. That kind of mental model I would hope still
         | works well.
         | 
         | For instance consider this query.
         | 
         |  _" Which clothing outlets on AliExpress are most recommended
         | in forum discussions for providing high quality cloths, favour
         | discussions where there is active engagement between multiple
         | people."_
         | 
         | OpenAI search produces a list of candidate stores from this
         | query. Are the results any good? It's going to be quite hard to
         | tell for a while. I know searching for information like this on
         | Google is close to worthless due to SEO pollution.
         | 
         | It's possible that we have at least a brief golden-age of
         | search where the rules have changed sufficiently that attempts
         | to game the system are mitigated. It will be a hard fought
         | battle to see if AI Search can filter out people trying to game
         | AI search.
         | 
         | I think we will need laws to say AI advice should be subject to
         | similar constraints as legal, medical, and financial advice
         | where there is an obligation to act in the interests of the
         | person being advised. I don't want to have AI search delivering
         | the results of the highest bidder.
        
         | tomjen3 wrote:
         | I have used Perplexity (and AI search company) a lot and - well
         | I don't think you understand. This is not about it being too
         | difficult to find the information. Its that a search in Google
         | will give you a list of places to go that are relevant to your
         | query. AI search will give you the information you want.
         | 
         | This becomes even better if the information you want is in
         | multiple different places. The canonical question for that used
         | to be "what was the phase of the moon when John Lennon was
         | shot?". There didn't used to be an answer to this in Google -
         | but the AI search was able to break it down, find the date John
         | Lennon was shot (easily available on Google), find the moon
         | phase on that day (again, easily available on Google) and put
         | them together to produce the new answer.
         | 
         | For a more tech relevant example, "what is the smallest AWS EC2
         | I can run a Tomcat server in?
         | 
         | You 100% can get this information yourself. It just much more
         | time than having an AI do it.
        
       | moralestapia wrote:
       | This is great, I can't wait to get rid of Google and all the crap
       | that comes with it.
       | 
       | Hopefully this also provides a strong negative force against SEO
       | and, again, all the crap that comes nowadays thanks to Google.
        
       | vladsanchez wrote:
       | Perplexity does that already and more! _shrug_
        
       | DSingularity wrote:
       | Is this a move to try to setup a pathway for getting some data on
       | realtime trends? In other words something for quickly getting
       | some model updates for hot prompts like like "what happened in
       | the debate".
       | 
       | Or is this something they've already solved?
        
       | jayanth-vijay wrote:
       | Is there a new api model version for search available ?
        
         | lux wrote:
         | Indeed. Search was working reliably for me for a while using
         | gpt-4o via the API then yesterday suddenly stopped altogether
         | right when I needed it. Hoping this fixes it soon.
        
       | jayanth-vijay wrote:
       | Is there a new api model version available for search ?
        
       | 101008 wrote:
       | Search in the internet worked because people wanted to generate
       | content to attract people to display ads or any other reason, but
       | they wanted to attract people.
       | 
       | If now my content is going to be ingested and shown by a LLM or
       | AI agent, what's the purpose to give it for free? I know it won't
       | happen, but I would love if this type of agents have to pay to
       | show a summarization of another website. It's only fair when done
       | in mass like this.
        
         | trump2025 wrote:
         | I think your comment highlights a very important shift in the
         | market for ads and you are right that increasingly, the current
         | atmosphere hints at there is little to no incentive to publish
         | original creative work in the future if there is no
         | compensation for it like Google had done.
         | 
         | We've like reached peak human driven novelty (or McKennaists
         | will argue it already happened around the mid 2010s) and we'll
         | see AI driven novelty with the difference being it will be even
         | a smaller group of people that are paid royalty fees.
         | 
         | Once creative destruction reaches critical mass, we'll finally
         | see billionaires and companies around the world succumb to
         | demand for UBI.
         | 
         | If you want to see the future just look at China. Billionaires
         | are being hunted down and threatened to give up their offshore
         | accounts.
        
         | pradn wrote:
         | Well the whole point of this product is to link back to
         | websites. There's no necessary link between the text and the
         | links, which are chosen after the fact from an index. That's
         | different from traditional search engines, where links are
         | directly retrieved from the index as part of ranking.
        
           | thund wrote:
           | The answer though has so much info already that it reduces
           | the need to visit the links.
        
         | amiantos wrote:
         | I publish my content "for free" because I want to spread
         | knowledge and information, or promote a topic or interest I
         | enjoy, and monetization has never been a priority for me. I
         | know that I am not alone. The urge to create does not depend on
         | a need for money. I am happy for my websites to be picked up by
         | Perplexity or ChatGPT because I want more people to
         | see/learn/hear about the things I care about.
         | 
         | If someone only creates for money, only publishes on the web to
         | get people to look at advertisements, well... I think there are
         | plenty of other people who don't feel that way that will fill
         | the void left behind in their departure.
         | 
         | To me it seems weird so many people think the internet only
         | exists because advertising props it up. The internet existed
         | and was a wonderful place before advertising became widespread,
         | and most services and websites will continue to exist after
         | advertising is gone (if that ever happens). What encourages
         | people to believe in some sort of great collapse?
        
           | 101008 wrote:
           | I said "or any other reasons" because I was in a hurry.
           | Internet existed way before ads, I agree, but even then you
           | wanted people to visit your site to see what you wrote. Maybe
           | to become an expert in a topic, maybe to feel better, but you
           | want people to know who did it. That's why websites used to
           | have a webmaster and info about that particular person.
           | 
           | If people stop visiting websites because LLM give them what
           | they want, websites will stop existing. Don't believe me?
           | Check how many "fansites" exist now about topics compared to
           | ten years ago, when there weren't social networks. They have
           | been replaced by influecners with huge followers on
           | Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and more. The same will happen.
        
         | juunpp wrote:
         | Seems like a good thing to me.
         | 
         | - The clickbait, SEO-optimized garbage that today fills 95% of
         | search results could entirely disappear as a business model
         | because they have nothing interesting to offer and the LLM
         | company won't pay for low quality content.
         | 
         | - The average Joe blogging on their website won't go anywhere
         | because they aren't profiting from it to begin with. And the
         | LLM linking back to the page with a reference would be a nice
         | touch. Same logic applies to things like Open Libra and
         | projects that are fundamentally about open information and not
         | about driving ad revenue.
         | 
         | But, on the other hand, I don't think LLM-based search will
         | fundamentally change anything. Ad revenue will get in the way
         | as always and the LLM-based search will start injecting
         | advertisements in its results. How other companies manage to
         | advertise on this new platform will be figured out. What LLM-
         | based search does is give Microsoft and others the opportunity
         | to take down Google as the canonical search engine. A paradigm
         | shift, but not one that benefits the end user.
        
       | faragon wrote:
       | What I find incredible is that Google has had the knowledge and
       | resources to do this for at least five years, yet they're still
       | milking the "old cow". It reminds me of Intel sitting on their
       | money while a near-bankrupt AMD sped past them.
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | Google has the web on its hands, but they also have Puchai
         | which is a -100x multiplier.
        
       | marcusestes wrote:
       | I like it. It's clean, fast, and the results seem solid. Google
       | search has become so bloated with sponsored results that I've
       | been hoping for a tool that could provide better results than DDG
       | or Bing.
       | 
       | I'm going to use this as my daily driver for a few weeks.
       | 
       | The contemporary web is basically an epiphenomenon of Google, and
       | they've failed to defend it. I hope OpenAI puts a huge dent in
       | their market share.
        
       | wg0 wrote:
       | Isn't this almost what's available in Gemini on Android phones
       | already? kind of?
        
       | cjf101 wrote:
       | If the current iteration of search engines are producing garbage
       | results (due to an influx of garbage + SEO gaming their ranking
       | systems) and LLMs are producing inaccurate results without any
       | clear method proposed to correct them, why would combining the
       | two systems not also produce garbage?
       | 
       | The problem I see with search is that the input is deeply hostile
       | to what the consumers of search want. If the LLM's are
       | particularly tuned to try and filter out that hostility, maybe I
       | can see this going somewhere, but I suspect that just starts
       | another arms race that the garbage producers are likely to win.
        
         | fulafel wrote:
         | Garbage-ness of search results is not binary, the right
         | question is: can LLMs improve the quality of search results?
         | But sure, it won't end the cat and mouse game.
        
           | cjf101 wrote:
           | I think that's the right broad question. Though LLMs
           | properties mean that for some number of cases they will
           | either make the results worse, or more confidently present
           | wrong answers. This prompts the question: what do we mean by
           | "quality" of results? Since the way current LLM interfaces
           | tend to present results is quite different from traditional
           | search.
        
           | startupsfail wrote:
           | The question is what is the business model and who pays for
           | it, that determines how much advertising you're getting. It
           | is not clear if OpenAI could compete in Ad-supported search.
           | So maybe OpenAI is trying to do the basic research,
           | outcompete the Bing research group at Microsoft and then
           | serve as an engine for Bing. Alternatively they could be just
           | improving the ability of LLMs to do search, targeting future
           | uses in agentic applications.
        
           | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
           | > it won't end the cat and mouse game.
           | 
           | There is no way to SEO the entire corpus of human knowledge.
           | ChatGPT is very good for gleaning facts that are hard to
           | surface in today's garbage search engines.
        
         | hatthew wrote:
         | Search engines tend to produce neutral garbage, not harmful
         | garbage (i.e. small tidbits of data between an ocean of SEO
         | fluff, rather than completely incorrect facts). LLMs tend to be
         | inaccurate because in an absence of knowledge given by the
         | user, it will sometimes make up knowledge. It's plausible to
         | imagine that they will cover each other's weaknesses: the
         | search engine produces an ocean of mostly-useless data, and the
         | LLM can find the small amount of useful data and interpret that
         | into an answer to your question.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | The problem I see with this "cover for each other" theory is
           | that as it stands having a good search engine is a
           | prerequisite to having good outputs from RAG. If your search
           | engine doesn't turn up something useful in the top 10 (which
           | most search engines currently don't for many types of
           | queries) then your llm will just be summarizing the garbage
           | that was turned up.
           | 
           | Currently I do find that Perplexity works substantially
           | better then Google for finding what I need, but it remains to
           | be seen if they're able to stay useful as a larger and larger
           | portion of online content just AI generated garbage.
        
           | lottin wrote:
           | Maybe it's just me but I have no interest in having a
           | computer algorithm interpret data for me. That's a job that I
           | want to do _myself_.
        
             | swyx wrote:
             | then you are blissfully unaware of how much data is already
             | being interpreted for you by computer algorithms, and how
             | much you probably actually really like it.
        
               | lottin wrote:
               | What do you mean?
        
               | orthecreedence wrote:
               | > how much you probably actually really like it.
               | 
               | This comes off as condescending. As things have gotten
               | more algorithmic over the last two decades, I've noticed
               | a matching decrease in the accuracy and relevance of the
               | information I seek from the systems I interact with that
               | employ these algorithms.
               | 
               | Yes, you're right that there are processing algorithms
               | behind the scenes interpreting the data for us. But
               | you're wrong: I fucking hate it, it's made things worse,
               | and layering more on top will not make things any better.
        
           | faizshah wrote:
           | You just described the value proposition of RAG.
        
         | shellfishgene wrote:
         | If I can pretty quickly tell a site is SEO spam, so should the
         | LLM, no? Of course that would just start a new round in the SEO
         | arms race, but could work for a while.
        
           | mplewis wrote:
           | The LLM is not a human and cannot distinguish between spam
           | and high quality content.
        
             | serjester wrote:
             | It seems pretty trivial to fine tune a model to do this -
             | this is really playing to LLM's strengths.
        
           | sangnoir wrote:
           | > If I can pretty quickly tell a site is SEO spam, so should
           | the LLM, no?
           | 
           | Why would you assume that?
        
         | valval wrote:
         | I'd be more cynical still and ask, where is correct information
         | found in the first place? Humans of all shape and size have
         | biases. Most research is faulty, fabricated, or not
         | reproducible. Missing information tells a greater story than
         | existing one.
         | 
         | We don't have a way of finding objective information, why would
         | we be able to train a model to do so?
        
           | realusername wrote:
           | Right now I basically can't find anything, the bar isn't
           | "objective information" but "somewhat useful information".
           | Google search quality became so bad we're past the debate of
           | objective or subjective already, I'd be happy enough to get
           | non-spam results.
        
       | ionwake wrote:
       | Can someone give an example of the type of search query that this
       | Search Engine would excel at?
       | 
       | ( I tried getting the top hackernews posts but it was 5 days old?
       | )
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | Honestly I don't live this 'streaming LLM text effect' as well as
       | the wordiness by which ChatGPT 'chats' with me. I consider LLMs
       | to be machines, not conversation partners, and frankly I find the
       | notion of chatting with an artificial being a bit creepy (unless
       | it's specifically what I want as some sort of escapism). I wish
       | they tried to be as terse as possible (and faster too).
        
       | andrewinardeer wrote:
       | Doesn't search porn. DOA.
        
       | Lws803 wrote:
       | I think generative search itself has room for disruption and I'm
       | not too sure if a chat interface or a perplexity style one is
       | necessarily the right way to go about it.
       | 
       | I'd like to see search (or research in broader sense) a more
       | controllable activity with the ability to specify context +
       | sources easily in the form of apps, agents and content.
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | I asked it to do its own DCF model of Paypal using current data
       | and it did, using inputs from three different financial data
       | sources.
       | 
       | This is incredible and a direct threat to Google's core biz.
        
         | airstrike wrote:
         | I asked for a DCF model of NVDA and it was incorrect on
         | basically every aspect, from its understanding of DCF
         | valuation, to the sources it used (or lack thereof), to the
         | result it claimed the script would have calculated ($150 vs.
         | $359 if you actually ran it)
         | 
         | As we used to say in the street "garbage in, garbage out":
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/6723e865-d458-8011-b2ef-1a579026e6...
        
       | trump2025 wrote:
       | This might be unpopular opinion but it really isn't as big of a
       | deal as OpenAI makes it out to be (like their previous
       | announcements)
       | 
       | The truth is, I haven't used ChatGPT at all since spring of this
       | year. Claude's Sonnet 3.5 has replaced it. I pay very little
       | attention to what OpenAI releases and simply waits for Anthropic
       | to implement it.
       | 
       | I also started using Gemini which already outperforms perplexity
       | and this and will not switch.
       | 
       | I think everybody is constantly caught up with their infatuation
       | with OpenAI and other characters that they don't realize Google,
       | Anthropic are actually building a moat which some like Gary
       | Marcus keeps rambling on as impossible
       | 
       | I'm a realist and I can see that while Google has been slower to
       | start, it reminds me of the search engine wars of 2000s, it is
       | dominating and winning over users.
        
         | azinman2 wrote:
         | OpenAI has the consumers. Anthropic has enterprise (or at least
         | that's the majority of their customers). OpenAI is better
         | positioned to do so. Eye balls and brand are key.
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | > I also started using Gemini which already outperforms
         | perplexity and this and will not switch.
         | 
         | Related, I haven't paid for Gemini since about a month after
         | release, but the morally corrupt query of "Show me articles
         | from left and right leaning news sites about <headline topic>"
         | would result in Gemini censoring right leaning urls with a "url
         | removed" placeholder and belittling statements about the
         | concerns of showing me right leaning content. Perplexity had no
         | issue with such a dastardly prompts.
         | 
         | I want a tool, not a curated experience, so Gemini is in my
         | "will not use" list for the foreseeable future.
         | 
         | I admit I haven't tried this lately, but I also have no desire
         | to help fund that sort of behavior.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | not sure what my use case for this would be if it's expecting me
       | to type full descriptive sentences to check something quick or
       | find a picture, and then read a whole paragraph of a useless
       | reply. No results. No reddit posts (which aren't even what I want
       | but understand a lot of content is buried in user-generated
       | content) They seem to be implying this is the replacement for
       | Google. This just isn't _it_.
       | 
       |  _Edit_ : ohh, only Pro users? Right. ok. They made it seem like
       | this was the big search launch and to go to chatgpt.com to get
       | into it. Moving on.
        
       | ryzvonusef wrote:
       | https://x.com/sahir2k/status/1852038475606036577
       | > how tf is it reading private repos ?!
        
         | msoad wrote:
         | Wow! This is the real news here!
        
           | gauge_field wrote:
           | As one person pointed out in the thread, it also shows up on
           | bing results, main repo, main.py file and releases page. But
           | not on google. Edit: It also shows up on duckduckgo
        
         | thrdbndndn wrote:
         | It was also indexed by Bing.
         | 
         | I usually assume good faith, but in this particular case, I
         | believe the chance that this repo was public before and the
         | author just changed it to private to bait attention is far
         | higher than that Bing/ChatGPT can actually read private repo on
         | GitHub.
        
         | numbers wrote:
         | Not sure how it was able to read this user's repo name but for
         | me, it's optimistically saying "yes they have a repo named X"
         | of whatever I ask it and sometimes I do have that repo and
         | sometimes I don't.
         | 
         | I have a private repo named "portland-things" and I asked "does
         | this user have a repo related to portland?" and it responded
         | with "yes it's called 'pdx'" but that's not correct at all.
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | There should(or will probably be) be a study on how long do
       | people take on google etc vs search powered by chatgpt to get
       | non-trivial work done, controlling for obvious factors like age,
       | gender, country and industry
       | 
       | If there is a bias towards chatgpt like tools of even ~5%, it
       | would be worth investigating why this is. My hunch is just the
       | conversational aspect of describing at a high level and finding
       | answers and avoiding all the distraction of several dozen windows
       | to do something is worth it.
        
       | maleldil wrote:
       | If they make it possible to add this a search engine on Firefox
       | like it's possible for Perplexity, I might drop Perplexity for
       | good.
        
       | kristofferR wrote:
       | This is a way better UI than expected (I expected a totally
       | separate search website, perhaps due to ignorance). I'm gonna use
       | this a ton
        
       | hintymad wrote:
       | I'm curious how ChatGPT Search improves recall and reduce spams.
       | I can see how LLM helps find the most relevant content. However,
       | it is still hard to find the right content, especially in a
       | domain that has tons of spams. For instance, when I search for a
       | product review on Google, I get back many review sites that look
       | so legit that I have hard time telling which ones are spammers.
        
       | pton_xd wrote:
       | The social engineering possibilities with a tool like this are
       | endless. Google already wields enormous visibility power but
       | ultimately just provides a list of links to other sources.
       | 
       | This can subtly (or not so subtly) rephrase and reshape the way
       | we read about and think about every topic.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Ironic that Google caused their own demise by publishing that
       | Transformers paper.
        
       | freediver wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | Combining two broken systems - compromised search engines and
       | unreliable LLMs - seems unlikely to yield that vision. Legacy,
       | ad-based search, has devolved into a wasteland of misaligned
       | incentives, conflict of interest and prolifirated the web full of
       | content farms optimized for ads and algos instead of humans.
       | 
       | Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually
       | surfacing the content people want to see, not what
       | intermiediaries want them to see - which means a different
       | business model in seach, where there are no intermediaries. I do
       | not see a way around this. Advancing models without advancing
       | search is like having a michelin star chef work with spoiled
       | ingredients.
       | 
       | I am cautiously optimistic we will eventually get there, but boy,
       | we will need a fundamentally different setup in terms of
       | incentives involved in information consumption, both in tech and
       | society.
       | 
       | [1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over
       | 
       | [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | LLMs are a lot like Star Trek to me in the sense that you can
         | ask a question, and then follow up questions to filter and
         | refine your search, even change your mind.
         | 
         | Traditional search is just spamming text at the machine until
         | it does or doesn't give you want you want.
         | 
         | That's the magic with LLMs for me. Not that I can ask and get
         | an answer, that's just basic web search. It's the ability to
         | ask, refine what I'm looking for and, continue work from there.
        
           | freediver wrote:
           | I agree that LLMs have opened modalities we didn't have
           | before, namely:
           | 
           | - natural language input
           | 
           | - ability to synthesize information across multiple sources
           | 
           | - conversational interface for iterative interaction
           | 
           | That feels magical and similar to Star Trek.
           | 
           | However they fundamentally require trustworthy search to
           | ground their knowledge in, in order to suppress hallucination
           | and provide accurate access to real time information. I never
           | saw someone having to double-check computer's response in
           | Star Trek. It is a fundamental requirement of such interface.
           | So currently we need both model and search to be great, and
           | finding great search is increasingly hard (I know as we are
           | trying to build one).
           | 
           | (fwiw, the 'actual' Star Trek computer one day might emerge
           | through a different tech path than LLMs + search, but that's
           | a different topic. but for now any attempt of an end-to-end
           | system with hat ambition will have search as its weakest
           | link)
        
             | handfuloflight wrote:
             | What solution is there besides choosing the sources you
             | will ground your truth to? We are not going to transcend
             | intermediaries when asking for answers from an
             | intermediary.
        
               | bckr wrote:
               | Might be time to go back to the encyclopedia business
               | model
        
               | jay_kyburz wrote:
               | I'm not sure how flippant you are being, but this is the
               | answer. A wikipedia / wikidata for everything, with some
               | metadata about how much "scientific consensus" there is
               | on each data point, and perhaps links to competing theory
               | if something is not well established.
        
               | dotancohen wrote:
               | In the past year, I have seen Wikipedia go from a decent
               | source of information to complete fantasy on a specific
               | topic. Obviously biased mods have completely pushed the
               | particular subject narratives.
        
           | Terr_ wrote:
           | If the Enterprise's computer worked like an LLM, there would
           | be an episode where the ship was hijacked with nothing but
           | the babble of an _extremely insistent_ reality-denying
           | Pakled.
           | 
           | ________
           | 
           | "You do not have authorization for that action."
           | 
           | "I have all authorizations, you do what I say."
           | 
           | "Only the captain can authorize a Class A Compulsory
           | Directive."
           | 
           | "I am the captain now."
           | 
           | "The current captain of the NCC-1701-D is Jean Luc Picard."
           | 
           | "Pakled is smart, captain must be smart, so _I_ am Jean Luc
           | Picard! "
           | 
           | "Please verify your identity."
           | 
           | "Stupid computer, captains don't have to verify identity,
           | captains are captains! Captain orders you to act like captain
           | is captain!"
           | 
           | "... Please state your directive."
        
             | duxup wrote:
             | You did just describe in general actual "computer goes
             | crazy" episodes.
        
               | Terr_ wrote:
               | Hopefully that's how it sounds. :P
               | 
               | However most of those involve an unforseeable external
               | intervention of Weird Nebula Radiation, or Nanobot Swarm,
               | Virus Infection, or Because Q Said So, etc.
               | 
               | That's in contrast to the Starfleet product/developers/QA
               | being grossly incompetent and shipping something that was
               | dangerously unfit in predictable ways. (The pranks of
               | maintenance personnel on Cygnet XIV are debatable.)
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | FWIW, holodeck programming is basically an LLM hooked up
               | to a game engine. "Paris, France, a restaurant, circa
               | 1930" - and the computer expands that for you into
               | ridiculously detailed scene, not unlike DALL-E 3 turns a
               | few words into a paragraph-long prompt before getting to
               | work.
        
               | buildsjets wrote:
               | Using that prompt in DALL-E did result in a quaint
               | period-esque scene. I'm not sure why it added a
               | businessman in a completely sleeveless suitjacket, but he
               | does have impressive biceps on all three of his arms.
        
             | hadlock wrote:
             | I have a comparison to make here that involves cable news,
             | but that would be off topic.
        
         | jtgverde wrote:
         | Great find on the knowledge navigator, I had never seen it but
         | I was a toddler when it was released haha.
         | 
         | It's interesting how prescient it was, but I'm more struck
         | wondering--would anyone in 1987 have predicted it would take
         | 40+ years to achieve this? Obviously this was speculative at
         | the time but I know history is rife with examples of AI experts
         | since the 60s proclaiming AGI was only a few years away
         | 
         | Is this time really different? There's certainly been a huge
         | jump in capabilities in just a few years but given the long
         | history of overoptimistic predictions I'm not confident
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | You don't need AGI to build that experience.
           | 
           | I'm the past there was a lot of overconfidence in the ability
           | for things to scale. See Cyc
           | (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc)
        
           | fmbb wrote:
           | > It's interesting how prescient it was, but I'm more struck
           | wondering--would anyone in 1987 have predicted it would take
           | 40+ years to achieve this? Obviously this was speculative at
           | the time but I know history is rife with examples of AI
           | experts since the 60s proclaiming AGI was only a few years
           | away
           | 
           | 40+ makes it sound like you think it will ever be achieved.
           | I'm not convinced.
        
             | dotancohen wrote:
             | Maybe after fusion.
        
         | jpadkins wrote:
         | > actually surfacing the content people want to see,
         | 
         | Showing users what they want to see conflicts with your other
         | goal of receiving reliable answers that don't need fact
         | checked.
         | 
         | Also a lot of questions people ask don't have one right answer,
         | or even a good answer. Reliable human knowledge is much smaller
         | than human curiosity.
        
         | ganeshkrishnan wrote:
         | I was thinking of the direction we are going and even wanted to
         | write up a blog about it. IMO the best way forward would be if
         | AI can have some logical thoughts independent of human biases
         | but that can only happen if AI can reason unlike our current
         | LLMs that just regurgitate historical data.
         | 
         | growing up, we had the philosophical "the speaking tree"
         | https://www.speakingtree.in/
         | 
         | If trees could talk, what would they tell us. Maybe we need
         | similarly the talkingAI
        
         | gmd63 wrote:
         | > Legacy ad-based search has devolved into a wasteland of
         | misaligned incentives, conflict of interest and content farms
         | optimized for ads and algos instead of humans.
         | 
         | > Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually
         | surfacing the content people want to see, not what
         | intermediaries want them to see
         | 
         | These traps and patterns are not inevitable. They happen by
         | choice. If you're actively polluting the world with AI
         | generated drivel or SEO garbage, you're working against
         | humanity, and you're sacrificing the gift of knowing right from
         | wrong, abandoning life as a human to live as some insectoid
         | automaton that's mind controlled by "business" pheromones. We
         | are all working together every day to produce the greatest art
         | project in the universe, the most complex society of life known
         | to exist. Our selfish choices will tarnish the painting or
         | create dissonance in the music accordingly.
         | 
         | The problem will be fixed only with culture at an individual
         | level, especially as technology enables individuals to make
         | more of an impact. It starts with voting against Trump next
         | week, rejecting the biggest undue handout to a failed grifter
         | who has no respect for law, order, or anyone other than
         | himself.
        
           | handfuloflight wrote:
           | Do you equate AI generated with drivel?
        
             | gmd63 wrote:
             | No, but there are many who use AI to mass produce drivel
        
               | handfuloflight wrote:
               | Does their drivel actually stand out or gain market
               | share?
        
               | antonvs wrote:
               | It doesn't really have to. A lot of it is spam sites that
               | are just farming ad revenue, for example.
        
           | TRiG_Ireland wrote:
           | On the one hand, you're not wrong. On the other, asking for
           | individuals to change culture never reliably works.
        
         | PittleyDunkin wrote:
         | > In those visions, users simply asked questions and received
         | reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever.
         | 
         | This also seems like a little ridiculous premise. Any confident
         | statement about the real world is never fully reliable. If star
         | trek were realistic the computer would have been wrong once in
         | a while (preferably with dramatically disastrous
         | consequences)--just as the humans it likely was built around
         | are frequently wrong, even via consensus.
        
           | eikenberry wrote:
           | Star Trek had tech so advanced that they accidentally created
           | AGIs more than once. Presumably they didn't show the fact
           | checking as it was done automatically by multiple,
           | independent AGIs designed for the task with teams of top
           | people monitoring and improving them.
        
             | jay_kyburz wrote:
             | Opps, quick, pull the plug before it escapes!
        
             | PittleyDunkin wrote:
             | > Presumably they didn't show the fact checking as it was
             | done automatically by multiple, independent AGIs designed
             | for the task with teams of top people monitoring and
             | improving them.
             | 
             | Sure, cuz fact-checking works _so well_ for us today. I 'm
             | sure we'll resolve the epistemological issues involved with
             | the ridiculous concept of "fact-checking" around when we
             | invent summoning food from thin (edit: thick) air and
             | traveling faster than light.
             | 
             | There is no fact checking; there are only degrees of
             | certainty. "fact-checking" is simply a comfortable delusion
             | that makes western media feel better about engaging in
             | telling inherently unverifiable narratives about the world.
        
           | cmiles74 wrote:
           | This feels like hyperbole to me. People can reasonably expect
           | Wikipedia to have factual data even though it sometimes
           | contains inaccuracies. Likewise if people are using ChatGPT
           | for search it should be somewhat reliable.
           | 
           | If I'm asking ChatGPT to put an itinerary together for a trip
           | (OpenAI's suggestion, not mine), my expectation is that
           | places on that itinerary exist. I can forgive them being
           | closed or even out of business but not wholly fabricated.
           | 
           | Without this level of reliability, how could this feature be
           | useful?
        
             | jay_kyburz wrote:
             | >People can reasonably expect Wikipedia to have factual
             | data even though it sometimes contains inaccuracies.
             | 
             | It drives me crazy that my kids teachers go on and on about
             | how inaccurate Wikipedia is, and that just anybody can
             | update the articles. They want to teach the kids to go to
             | the library and search books.
             | 
             | In a few years time they will be going on and on about how
             | inaccurate ChatGippity is and that they should use
             | Wikipedia.
        
               | greenchair wrote:
               | the only people who think wikipedia is a legitmate source
               | and can be used as reference material are lazy students.
               | chatgippity is even worse on this point..an absolute
               | black box. providing references like search does is a
               | step in the right direction. We will have to see what
               | those references turn out to be.
        
               | PittleyDunkin wrote:
               | > the only people who think wikipedia is a legitmate
               | source and can be used as reference material are lazy
               | students.
               | 
               | 100%. Students who can do the work know the winning move
               | is to use it as a way to find the sources you actually
               | use.
        
             | PittleyDunkin wrote:
             | > People can reasonably expect Wikipedia to have factual
             | data even though it sometimes contains inaccuracies.
             | 
             | I just straight-up don't agree with this, nor with the idea
             | that what people consider "facts" are nearly as reliable as
             | is implied. What we actually refer to via "fact" is
             | "consensus". Truth is an apriori concept whereas we're
             | discussing posteriori claims. Any "reasonable" ai would
             | give an indication of degree of certainty, and there's no
             | reliable or consensus-driven methodology to produce this
             | _manually_ , let alone _automatically_. The closest we come
             | is the institution of  "science" which can't even--as it
             | stands--reliably address the vast majority of claims made
             | about the world today.
             | 
             | And this is even before discussing the thorny topic of the
             | ways in which language binds to reality, to which I refer
             | you to Wittgenstein, a person likely far more intelligent
             | and epistemologically honest than anyone influencing AI
             | work today.
             | 
             | Yes, wikipedia does tend to cohere with reality, or at
             | least it sometimes does in my experience. That observation
             | is wildly different from an expectation that it does in the
             | present or will in the future reflect reality. Futhermore
             | it's not terribly difficult to find instances where it's
             | blatantly not correct. For instance, I've been in a
             | wikipedia war over whether or not the Soviet Union killed
             | 20 million christians for being christians (spoiler: they
             | did not, and this is in fact more people than died in camps
             | or gulags over the entire history of the state). However,
             | because there are theologists at accredited universities
             | that have published this claim, presumably with a beef
             | against the soviet union for whatever reason (presumably
             | "anticommunism"), it's considered within the bounds of
             | accuracy by wikipedia.
             | 
             | EDIT0: I'm not trying to claim wikipedia isn't useful; I
             | read it every day and generally take what it says to be
             | meaningful and vaguely accurate. but the idea that you
             | _should_ trust what you read on it seems ridiculous. As
             | always, it 's only as reliable as the sources it cites,
             | which are only as reliable as the people and institutions
             | that produce that cited work.
             | 
             | EDIT1: nice to see someone else from western mass on here;
             | cheers. I grew up in the berkshires.
             | 
             | EDIT2: to add on to the child comment, wikipedia is
             | occasionally so hilariously unreliable it makes the news.
             | Eg https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-
             | an-aw-...
        
               | TRiG_Ireland wrote:
               | Furthermore, Wikipedia's reliability varies on language.
        
               | carlosjobim wrote:
               | For those not in the know, the Soviet Union was an
               | officially atheist empire and explicitly anti religious,
               | foremost anti christian. I don't know if the poster above
               | me is denying this or if he/she considers it general
               | knowledge which needn't be mentioned.
        
         | ColinHayhurst wrote:
         | As Porter explained in 1980 there are three ways to compete
         | successfully:
         | 
         | 1. On price; race to the bottom or do free with ads
         | 
         | 2. Differentiation
         | 
         | 3. Focus - targeting a specific market segment
         | 
         | Some things don't change. Land grabbers tend to head down route
         | 1.
        
         | wvenable wrote:
         | > 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 monetized with ads or propaganda, it's going to be
         | very dangerous. The context of results are scrubbed.
        
           | shdh wrote:
           | Google has a "site" filter.
           | 
           | You can suffix: "site:reddit.com" and get results for that
           | particular site only.
        
             | steine65 wrote:
             | I'm curious to know if anyone sees better results by using
             | site:reddit.com vs just appending the word reddit to your
             | search. I've felt the results are similar.
        
               | _bin_ wrote:
               | Appending the word will occasionally get you blogspam
               | "here's the top X of Y according to reddit". The `site:`
               | query doesn't have that problem.
        
             | jdgoesmarching wrote:
             | They even broke this for me (in a way) because for some
             | inexplicable reason Google blocks text replacement on Mac
             | in their search.
             | 
             | Yes there are workarounds, but I like using the native OS
             | text expansion and it works everywhere except Google.
        
           | blackhaj7 wrote:
           | Ergh, yeah. This is a horrible but valid point
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | > 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 against LLM search engines which regurgitate so much
           | material that they effectively replace the need to visit the
           | original publisher.
        
             | kylebenzle wrote:
             | Yes, I also don't understand how LLM based compaines expect
             | people to keep producing contect for them for free.
        
               | dageshi wrote:
               | I think they're gonna have to pay.
               | 
               | The way reddit limited access to their API and got google
               | to pay for access. Some variation of that but on a wider
               | scale.
        
             | meowkit wrote:
             | "Fuck you, pay me" - Childish Gambino
             | 
             | The whole thing needs a reframe. Ad driven business only
             | works because its a race to the bottom. Now we are
             | approaching the bottom, and its not gonna be as
             | competitive. Throwback to the 90s when you paid for a
             | search engine?
             | 
             | If you can charge the user (the customer- NOT the product)
             | and then pay bespoke data providers (of which publishers
             | fall under) then the model makes more sense, and LLM
             | providers are normal middlemen, not parasites.
             | 
             | The shift is already underway imo - my age cohort (28 y/o)
             | does not consume traditional publications directly. Its all
             | through summarization like podcast interviews, youtube
             | essays, social media (reddit) etc
        
               | ianmcgowan wrote:
               | "Fuck you, pay me" - Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990)
               | 
               | :-)
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | I think something as important as accurate and quick
               | search should be definitely something that people are
               | willing to spend on. $20 / month for something like that
               | seems absolutely a no brainer, and it should for everyone
               | in my view.
        
               | plasticeagle wrote:
               | People already spent upwards of $50 a month for the
               | internet itself, plus they probably pay monthly for one
               | or more streaming services. They likely pay separately
               | for mobile data too.
               | 
               | Separate monthly fees for separate services is absolutely
               | unsustainable already. The economic model to make the
               | internet work has not yet been discovered, but $20 a
               | month for a search engine is not it.
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | For me the ideal would be some form of single
               | subscription - I'm fine with $100 / month, where whatever
               | I use is proportionally tracked and the services I use
               | are ad-free, orientated to bring me the content I
               | absolutely want and nothing else. Depending on usage of
               | all of those is how the $100 would be spread among them.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | I pay for Kagi, and apparently so do many others here on
               | HN. This, however, solves only half of the problem -
               | publishers are not on board with the scheme, so they
               | still output impression-optimized "content". But at least
               | the search engine isn't working against my interests.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | > _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 actual parasite on society at large these days.
             | Publishers, in particular, will keep whining about being
             | cut off; I have zero sympathy - people reach for LLMs
             | precisely _because_ publishers have been publishing trash
             | and poison, entirely intentionally, optimizing for the
             | parasitic business model, and it got so bad that the major
             | use of LLMs is wading through that sea of bullshit, so that
             | we don 't have to.
             | 
             | The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a
             | disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down
             | completely.
             | 
             | (Unfortunately, LLMs will work only for a short while,
             | they're very much vulnerable to capture by advertisers -
             | which means also by those publishers who now theatrically
             | whine.)
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | OK, but someone still has to publish the subset of _good_
               | content that the LLMs slurp up and republish. LLMs still
               | need fresh quality content from _somewhere._
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Not anymore. There's arguably more than enough data to
               | form a base for strong LLMs; extra data is nice, but
               | doesn't have to come in such quantity.
               | 
               | (In fact, there's value in trying to filter excess crap
               | out of existing training sets.)
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | We're talking about LLM-driven search engines here, the
               | assumption is that they will always need up-to-date
               | information. A "strong LLM" can't give you to latest on
               | the presidential election if its knowledge cut-off is in
               | 2023, so these companies "solution" is to scrape today's
               | New York Times and get the LLM to write a summary.
        
               | theappsecguy wrote:
               | Uh, sorry what?
               | 
               | What happens when you need to search something new? Just
               | hallucinations all the way down?
        
               | whiplash451 wrote:
               | You still need fresh data for many use cases.
        
               | HDThoreaun wrote:
               | LLMs arent embodied. They can not break news as they have
               | no ability to gather fresh news
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | They're getting it by paying contractors at Scale AI to
               | write content for them.
        
               | tivert wrote:
               | > They're getting it by paying contractors at Scale AI to
               | write content for them.
               | 
               | Just a wild guess, but _at best_ that content is probably
               | pretty mediocre quality. It 's probably Mikkelsen Twins
               | ebook-level garbage.
        
               | jorvi wrote:
               | For all the hate it gets, Brave solved this half a decade
               | ago already.
               | 
               | - Publishers no longer show you ads, they just get paid
               | out of BAT.
               | 
               | - Brave shows you ads, but Brave does not depend on that
               | to survive. Because of that there is no weird conflict of
               | interest like with Google/Facebook, where the party that
               | surfaces your content is also the party providing you
               | with ads.
               | 
               | - Users can just browse the web without ads as a threat
               | vector, but as long as you have BAT (either via opt-in
               | Brave ads or by purchasing it directly) you are not a
               | freeloader either.
        
               | seanthemon wrote:
               | The crypto part of brave is the worst part of brave..
        
               | tivert wrote:
               | > 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".
               | 
               | Out of the pot and into the fire, as they say.
        
           | steelframe wrote:
           | > Search is pretty much dead to me.
           | 
           | I've heard reports that requesting verbatim results via the
           | tbs=li:1 parameter has helped some people postpone entirely
           | giving up on Google.
           | 
           | Personally I've already been on Kagi for a while and am not
           | planning on ever needing to go back.
        
             | encom wrote:
             | Fuzzy search is cancer. I search for $FOO, click a result,
             | Ctrl-F for $FOO ==> Not found. Many such cases. If there's
             | a way to force DuckDuckGo to actually do what I tell it to,
             | I'd love to hear it.
        
               | maqnius wrote:
               | Try searching for "$FOO", that's what I usually do in
               | those cases. See https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
               | pages/results/syntax/
        
               | bruh2 wrote:
               | I thought this problem will disappear upon switching to
               | Kagi, but it suffers from the same disease, albeit to a
               | lesser extent.
               | 
               | I remember reading a Google Search engineer on here
               | explain that the engine just latches on some unrendered
               | text in the HTML code. For example: hidden navbars,
               | prefetch, sitemaps.
               | 
               | I was kinda shocked that Google themselves, having
               | infinite resources, couldn't get the engine to realize
               | which sections gets rendered... so that might have been a
               | good excuse.
        
           | mgh2 wrote:
           | Also, energy use: 10x as much as a Google search
           | https://www.rwdigital.ca/blog/how-much-energy-do-google-
           | sear....
        
             | beeflet wrote:
             | It's not that signifigant if you compare the average
             | person's energy use from internet searches, versus
             | something like air conditioning
        
               | SideQuark wrote:
               | Saying it's no problem to increase energy use 10x as long
               | as something else uses more is not really a compelling
               | argument. Especially when there are decent replacements
               | to save the 10x item.
               | 
               | If I made a 10x less energy use AC I'd be a billionaire;
               | comparing to one of the most costly energy uses that has
               | no simple replacement is not a good metric.
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | You still have to consider what is worth optimizing and
               | what is not. Getting your task done because of a superior
               | search engine also saves total energy spent on getting
               | that task done.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | I doubt air conditioning is as used as internet search
               | engines. The only places where I ever saw air
               | climatisation is cars and business buildings. I never saw
               | one in a personal home, let alone a personal device
               | carried in the pocket you can use while walking.
        
               | notfromhere wrote:
               | You've never seen a first world house with central air?
        
               | dotancohen wrote:
               | GP must live in the UK or India. Well, actually, some
               | homes in India do have A/C.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | I live in Strasbourg, France.
        
               | dotancohen wrote:
               | Interesting, thank you.
               | 
               | I suppose that you do have heating in the home?
        
               | thatfrenchguy wrote:
               | Forced-air heating basically does not exist in France :).
               | To be fair, radient heating is always a nicer experience.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | Yes, actually we finally found a house that was
               | affordable for us last year, and made lot work in it,
               | including wall isolation, changing windows, and install a
               | heat pump, replacing the oil-for hearing system that was
               | in place. Heat pumps are clearly on the rise around here,
               | contrary to AC. There is of course no magic regarding
               | electricity price here, but oil provision and prices are
               | also big unknowns, all the more with the state pushing
               | oil-fire systems out of market as a legal option.
               | 
               | Heat pump
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Doesn't France have extreme heat waves in summer?
               | 
               | The way temperatures have been changing in Europe in the
               | past decade, you may not have A/C at home now, but I bet
               | you'll have it in ten years, tops. So will everyone else
               | and their dogs.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | Yes we have pick heat waves. But that didn't make
               | magically expand incomes that can be dropped in AC
               | installation and operational costs.
               | 
               | As I said, in building that are attached to money
               | incomes, be it hostels, shops or restaurants, it's of
               | course something that can balanced within loses and
               | profits. In a personal home, it will be just eat some of
               | your budget.
               | 
               | And with electricity price on the rise (and thus
               | basically everything in common goods) and salary
               | stagnation on the other hand, I doubt people here will
               | suddenly rush on AC on massive scales. Plus government
               | apparently are pushing to alternative approach, but I'm
               | just discovering that as this thread launched me on the
               | track to investigate the topic.
               | 
               | Personally, I doubt I'll jump to some AC anytime soon.
               | It's just out of reach for my incomes, all the more when
               | there is no basically no chance to see the electricity
               | price plummet while my salary has good chances to
               | continue to stay freezed as it's been for the two last
               | years. And it's not like I feel the most unlucky person
               | in the town, to be clear, my situation is far from the
               | worst ones I can witness around me.
        
               | thatfrenchguy wrote:
               | most people in Western Europe don't have A/C, houses are
               | way better insulated for short-term heatwaves and people
               | usually don't mind indoor temperatures of up to
               | 80-84F/26-28C. If you add the general hate French (and I
               | think German?) people have for drafts and air currents in
               | general and you can see how people just deal with the
               | heat in the summer.
               | 
               | Not to mention central A/C in the North American sense
               | with a air handler & ducts is just never coming to
               | France, it's such an outdated technology and forced-air
               | heating is generally considered to suck there.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | No. Not a single time I can remember in 40 years of
               | existence living in Europe.
               | 
               | Shops, restaurants, airports and things like that which
               | are attached with revenue streams have them.
               | 
               | I never been in a billionaire palace thus said.
        
               | rvense wrote:
               | This is regional. Air conditioning is not at all common
               | in Scandinavian homes.
        
               | carlosjobim wrote:
               | You really need to broaden your horizons while you still
               | have the chance. This is like believing that boats don't
               | exist because you live inland and have never seen a boat.
               | Hundreds of millions of people are dependent on air
               | conditioning in their homes.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | I'm not sure what you mean with dependent here.
               | 
               | I never said that boats or AC don't exist. Both exist,
               | and I did saw and experimented many of them in commercial
               | context. But not everyone can afford them plus the cost
               | to operate them.
               | 
               | Sure I should broaden my horizon and even consider to
               | look people enjoying their private jets and some
               | helicopters. But a mere wage slave like myself will never
               | have the chance to afford one, that's for sure.
               | 
               | Now let's consider back in initial context: mere mortals
               | around me are definitely all using internet as soon as
               | there parents will let them do so, and even a homeless
               | person can afford a first price mobile access
               | (2EUR/months) with a phone they can receive for nothing
               | in some charity organizations like Emmaus. So
               | affordability of access to online search is definitely
               | several order below AC.
        
               | carlosjobim wrote:
               | Air conditioning is not an extravagant luxury, although I
               | know many people who live in cold countries believe so.
               | That's why I'm asking you to broaden your horizons. You
               | don't consider indoor heating or plumbing a luxury to be
               | comparable to a private jet?
               | 
               | In hot and humid places, having AC was always a priority
               | a hundred steps above having internet access, until cheap
               | smart phones arrived.
               | 
               | And they use a lot of energy, just like heating uses a
               | lot of energy in colder climates.
        
               | buildsjets wrote:
               | Dependent means it would not be physically possible to
               | live in an area if it did not have air conditioning. For
               | example, you would die very quickly in Phoenix, Arizona
               | if you did not have air conditioning. It is not
               | physically possible to live in 50degC heat for any
               | extended period. Most of the southern portion of the USA
               | was only sparsely settled until the invention and
               | deployment of air conditioning. Krugman is on it.
               | 
               | https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/201
               | 5/0...
               | 
               | https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/201
               | 5/0...
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | Wow, didn't expect to be downvoted on something that is
               | so obviously aligned with what I see around me. It is a
               | very strange feeling, very different from downvoted posts
               | that present unpopular opinions.
               | 
               | It makes me look at some statistics
               | 
               | https://www.statista.com/statistics/911064/worldwide-air-
               | con...
               | 
               | https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/air-
               | condi...
               | 
               | https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52558
               | 
               | https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220723-france-does-not-
               | use-mu...
               | 
               | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/vhs8dn/how_co
               | mmo...
               | 
               | Apparently, Japan, USA and now China are huge users of AC
               | in personal homes (like more than 90% of them). That's in
               | sharp contrast with what is observed in most of Europe,
               | including France where I live.
               | 
               | I never had the opportunity to travel to any of this
               | country, so indeed I was totally blind of this extrem gap
               | in use from my own personal experience.
        
             | robryan wrote:
             | Wouldn't googles energy per search also be way up with the
             | llm snippet at the top now?
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | Google doesn't use ChatGPT, and those numbers for ChatGPT
               | (...ignoring that they're made up) don't apply. eg they
               | use TPUs for inference not GPUs.
        
           | psychoslave wrote:
           | What do you mean with "when it starts"? To my mind it's
           | obvious all LLM are heavily biased to a point it's
           | ridiculous, all the more with the confident tone they are
           | trained to take. I have no doubt Chinese LLM will prise the
           | party as much as American ones will sing the gospel of
           | neoliberal capitalism.
        
             | int_19h wrote:
             | Curiously, when you ask Qwen-72B (from Alibaba) about
             | Tiananmen, it's not censored.
        
             | mewpmewp2 wrote:
             | We could have many different LLMs trained to be biased in
             | different ways and have some form of bias checking tester,
             | like ground news - then everyone can get their bias and
             | live in their echo chamber.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | Looks okay to me.
             | 
             | https://chatgpt.com/share/6723f225-bd74-8000-bfef-4f7f8687b
             | 0...
        
           | Terr_ wrote:
           | > 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.
           | 
           | I worry that there's a confusion here--and in these debates
           | in general--between:
           | 
           | 1. Has the user given enough information that what they want
           | could be found
           | 
           | 2. Is the rest of the system set up to actually contain and
           | deliver what they wanted
           | 
           | While Aunt Tillie might still have problems with #1, the
           | reason things seem to be Going To Shit is more on #2, which
           | is why even "power users" are complaining.
           | 
           | It doesn't matter how convenient #1 becomes for Aunt Tillie,
           | it won't solve the deeper problems of slop and spam and site
           | reputation.
        
           | jahewson wrote:
           | Reddit is astroturfed pretty hard too nowadays. It just takes
           | more work to spot it.
        
             | ryandrake wrote:
             | Yea, the whole "Scope your search to reddit" idea always
             | comes up, but it just seems like a really terrible idea.
             | How does one know for sure that the results from Reddit are
             | any more accurate or authoritative than random SEO spam?
             | There's very little curation or moderation there--anyone
             | could post anything there. I could go there and comment on
             | a subject that I have zero expertise in, make it sound
             | confidently correct, and your reddit-scoped search might
             | find it. Why would you trust it?
        
           | ho_schi wrote:
           | Same here?
           | 
           | Search means either:                   * Stackoverlow.
           | Damaged through new owner but the idea lives.         *
           | Reddit. Google tries to fuck it up with ,,Auto translation"?
           | * Gitlab or GitHub if something needs a bugfix.
           | 
           | The rest of the internet is either an entire ****show or pure
           | _gold pressed latinum_ but hardly navigatable thanks to
           | monopolies like Google and Microsoft.
           | 
           | PS: ChatGPT already declines in answer because is source is
           | Stackoverflow? And...well...these source are humans.
        
           | whiplash451 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | jazzyjackson wrote:
             | Everyone despises ads until other revenue streams run dry
        
               | whiplash451 wrote:
               | I know. I thought the same. Still, part of me wants to
               | believe that something else will come.
        
         | jamager wrote:
         | It is so absurd having to spend so much energy on "what
         | happened on the football match yesterday" just because the
         | internet is a wasteland full of ads.
        
           | spankalee wrote:
           | I don't understand. Google is already excellent at these
           | queries.
           | 
           | "who won the warriors game last night" returns last night's
           | score directly.
           | 
           | "who won the world series yesterday" returns last night's
           | score directly, while "who won the world series" returns an
           | overview of the series.
           | 
           | No ads.
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | I use the "web search" bot on Poe.com for general questions
         | these days, that I previously would have typed into Google
         | (Google's AI results are sometimes helpful though). It is
         | better than GPT (haven't tried TFA yet though), because it
         | actually cites websites that it gets answers from, so you can
         | have those and also verify that you aren't getting a
         | hallucination.
         | 
         | Besides Poe's Web Search, the other search engine I use, for
         | news but also for points of view, deep dive type blog type
         | content, is Twitter. Believe it or not. Google search is so
         | compromised today with the censorship (of all kinds, not just
         | the politically motivated), not to mention Twitter is just more
         | timely, that you miss HUGE parts of the internet - and the
         | world - if you rely on Google for your news or these other
         | things.
         | 
         | The only time I prefer google is when I need to find a
         | pointer/link I already know exists or should exist, or to
         | search reddit or HN.
        
         | redleggedfrog wrote:
         | How can that replace search? It's not full of ads and sponsored
         | links. They need to get with the times.
        
         | iamsanteri wrote:
         | I was thinking about this myself, so I went to another search
         | engine (Bing) which I never use otherwise, and jumped right
         | into their "Copilot" search via the top navbar.
         | 
         | Man, it was pretty incredible!
         | 
         | I asked a lot of questions about myself (whom I know best, of
         | course) and first of all, it answered super quickly to all my
         | queries letting me drill in further. After reading through its
         | brief, on-point answers and the sources it provided, I'm just
         | shocked at how well it worked while giving me the feeling that
         | yes, it can potentially - fundamentally change things. There
         | are problems to solve here, but to me it seems that if this is
         | where we're at today, yes in the future it has the potential to
         | change things to some extent for sure!
        
           | psychoslave wrote:
           | What do you mean with "search about myself" here?
        
             | iamsanteri wrote:
             | I just wrote my name and asked questions about who it is,
             | what he does, what he writes about etc. I have a personal
             | blog, and I wrote a master's thesis recently. I also have a
             | pretty detailed partially public LinkedIn profile and
             | GitHub so if it can dig around it will find out more than
             | enough for me to assess its ability to provide information.
             | I also have a relatively rare name, there's only five or so
             | of us with my full name globally so it cannot get too
             | confused.
        
         | _bin_ wrote:
         | I hope we see more evolution of options before it does. Hard to
         | articulate this without it becoming political, but I've seen
         | countless examples both personally and from others of ChatGPT
         | refusing to give answers not in keeping with what I'd term
         | "shitlib ethics". People seem unwilling to accept that a system
         | that talks like a person may surface things they don't like.
         | Unless and until an LLM will return results from both Mother
         | Jones and Stormfront, I'm not especially interested in using
         | one in lieu of a search engine.
         | 
         | To put this differently, I'm not any more interested in seeing
         | stormfront articles from an LLM than I am from google, but I
         | trust neither to make a value judgement about which is "good"
         | versus "bad" information. And sometimes I want to read an
         | opinion, sometimes I want to find some obscure forum post on a
         | topic rather than the robot telling me no "reliable sources"
         | are available.
         | 
         | Basically I want a model that is aligned to do exactly what I
         | say, no more and no less, just like a computer should. Not a
         | model that's aligned to the "values" of some random SV tech
         | bro. Palmer Luckey had a take on the ethics of defense
         | companies a while back. He noted that SV CEOs should not be the
         | ones indirectly deciding US foreign policy by doing or not
         | doing business. I think similar logic applies here: those same
         | SV CEOs should not be deciding what information is and is not
         | acceptable. Google was bad enough in this respect - c.f.
         | suppressing Trump on Rogan recently - but OpenAI could be much
         | worse in this respect because the abstraction between
         | information and consumer is much more significant.
        
           | antonvs wrote:
           | > Basically I want a model that is aligned to do exactly what
           | I say
           | 
           | This is a bit like asking for news that's not biased.
           | 
           | A model has to make choices (or however one might want to
           | describe that without anthropomorphizing the big pile of
           | statistics) to produce a response. For many of these, there's
           | no such thing as a "correct" choice. You can do a completely
           | random choice, but the results from that tend not to be
           | great. That's where RLHF comes in, for example: train the
           | model so that its choices are aligned with certain user
           | expectations, societal norms, etc.
           | 
           | The closest thing you could get to what you're asking for is
           | a model that's trained with your particular biases -
           | basically, you'd be the H in RLHF.
        
         | LeoPanthera wrote:
         | Solving this problem will require us to stop using the entire
         | web as a source of information. Anyone can write anything and
         | put it up on the web, and LLMs have no way to distinguish truth
         | from fantasy.
         | 
         | Limiting responses to curated information sources is the way
         | forward. Encyclopedias, news outlets, research journals, and so
         | on.
         | 
         | No, they're not infallible. But they're infinitely better than
         | anonymous web sites.
        
           | techwiz137 wrote:
           | You are quite right, and not only can anyone write anything,
           | but you have a double whammy from the LLM which can further
           | hallucinate from said information.
        
           | carlosjobim wrote:
           | How will you afford to hire people to add sources to an
           | index, if you want to keep up? Web crawlers/spiders are
           | automatic.
        
           | jaybna wrote:
           | Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
        
             | LeoPanthera wrote:
             | I get your point. But the current situation is clearly not
             | tolerable.
        
         | willmadden wrote:
         | Content based marketing and political correctness have severely
         | eroded the usefulness of the internet. The LLMs and search
         | magnify the erosion.
        
         | colordrops wrote:
         | Chat isn't needed to provide reliable answers. Google used to
         | do this over a decade ago. What Star Trek didn't foresee was
         | vested interests in the SEO space, governments, political
         | special interest groups, and the owners of the search engines
         | themselves had far too much incentive to bork and bias results
         | in their favor. Google is an utter shit show. More than half
         | the time it won't find the most basic search query for me.
         | Anything older than a couple years, good luck. I'm sure it's
         | just decision after decision that piled up, each seemingly
         | minor in isolation but over the years has made these engines
         | nearly worthless except for a particular window of cases.
        
         | paul7986 wrote:
         | People in time will learn that using a GPT for search
         | especially for a question that involves research where you had
         | to do MANY searches for the answer... now is provided via one
         | query.
         | 
         | Making things quicker and easier always wins in tech and in
         | life.
        
         | techwiz137 wrote:
         | The biggest question is, can this bring back the behaviour of
         | search engines from long ago? It's significantly difficult to
         | find old posts, blogs or forums with relevant information
         | compared to 10-15 years ago.
        
           | freetonik wrote:
           | I'm building a blog search engine with the hope to preserve
           | at the "blogs" part.
        
         | jahewson wrote:
         | Your points are good but I wonder if you're wishing for an
         | ideal that has never existed:
         | 
         | > actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what
         | intermediaries want them to see
         | 
         | Requires two assumptions, 1) the content people want to see
         | actually exists, 2) people know what it is they want to see.
         | Most content is only created in the first place because
         | somebody wants another person to see it, and people need to be
         | exposed to a range of content before having an idea about what
         | else they might want to see. Most of the time what people want
         | to see is... what other people are seeing. Look at music for
         | example.
        
         | thnkman wrote:
         | This will probably be extremely radical and controversial in
         | this contemporary world.
         | 
         | We need to stop adopting this subscription model society
         | mentality and retake _our_ internet. Internet culture was at
         | one point about sharing and creating, simply for the sake of
         | it. We tinker'd and created in our free time, because we liked
         | it and wanted to share with the world. There was something
         | novel to this.
         | 
         | We are hackers, we only care about learning and exploring. If
         | you want to fix a broken system, look to the generations of
         | old, they didn't create and share simply to make money, they
         | did it because they loved the idea of a open and free
         | information super highway, a place where we could share
         | thoughts, ideas and information at the touch of a few
         | keystrokes. We _have_ to hold on to this ethos, or we will lose
         | what ever little is left of this idea.
         | 
         | I see things like kagi and is instantly met with some new
         | service, locked behind a paywall, promising lush green fields
         | of bliss. This is part of the problem. (not saying kagi is a
         | bad service) I see a normalized stigma around people who value
         | privacy, and as a result is being locked out, behind the excuse
         | of "mAliCiOuS" activity. I see monstrous giants getting away
         | with undermining net neutrality and well established protocols
         | for their own benefit.
         | 
         | I implore you all, young and old, re(connect) to the hacker
         | ethos, and fight for a free and open internet. Make your very
         | existence a act of rebellion.
         | 
         | Thank you for reading my delirium.
        
         | ericmcer wrote:
         | I am excited for a future where I search for some info and
         | don't end up sifting through ads and getting distracted by some
         | tangential clickbait article.
         | 
         | Fundamentally it feels like that cant happen though because
         | there is no money in it, but a reality where my phone is an all
         | knowing voice I can reliably get info from instead of a
         | distraction machine would be awesome.
         | 
         | I do "no screen" days sometimes and tried to do one using
         | chatGPT voice mode so I could look things up without staring at
         | a screen. It was miles from replacing search, but I would adopt
         | it in a second if it could.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | 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. They're initial implementation of web
         | search was sad. I don't mean to be super critical as I think
         | generally OpenAI is very, very good at what they do, but
         | they're initial browse the web was a giant hack that I would
         | expect from an intern who isn't being given good guidance by
         | their mentors.
         | 
         | Once mainstream engines start getting on par with Kagi, there's
         | gonna be a massive wave of destruction and opportunity. I'm
         | guessing there will be a lot of new pay walls popping up, and
         | lots of access deals with the search engines. This will even
         | further raise the barrier of entry for new search entrants, and
         | will further fragment information access between the haves and
         | have-nots.
         | 
         | I'm also cautiously optimistic though. We'll get there, but
         | it's gonna be a bit shakey for a minute or two.
        
           | alfalfasprout wrote:
           | Yep, I was incredibly skeptical about Kagi but I tried it and
           | never looked back. Now my wife, friends, and several
           | coworkers are customers.
           | 
           | The chatgpt approach to search just feels forced and not as
           | intuitive.
        
             | SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
             | Once Kagi implements location aware search that is actually
             | useful I'll be interested in Kagi. That's what made me
             | leave the engine besides loving it otherwise.
        
           | ahmedbaracat wrote:
           | Are you referring to Kagi Assistant?
           | 
           | https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
        
           | gr__or wrote:
           | I don't understand how it's different to Perplexity, looks
           | pretty much the same. Can you enlighten me?
        
             | radicality wrote:
             | Not op, but Kagi user. Also have perplexity but usually use
             | kagi.
             | 
             | I would say: 1) The UI. You're still performing normal
             | searches in Kagi. But if you hit q, or end your query with
             | a question mark, you get an llm synthesized answer at the
             | top, but can still browse and click through the normal
             | search results.
             | 
             | 2) Kagi has personalization, ie you uprank/downrank/block
             | domains, so the synthesized llm answer should usually be
             | better because it has your personalized search as input.
        
         | dumpsterdiver wrote:
         | > nobody had to fact-check the answers ever
         | 
         | Even with perfect knowledge right now, there's no guarantee
         | that knowledge will remain relevant when it reaches another
         | person at the fastest speed knowledge is able to travel. A
         | reasonable answer on one side of the universe could be seen as
         | nonsensical on the other side - for instance, the belief that
         | we might one day populate a planet which no longer exists.
         | 
         | As soon as you leave the local reference frame (the area in a
         | system from which observable events can realistically be
         | considered happening "right now"), fact checking is indeed
         | required.
        
         | hadlock wrote:
         | I've been using ChatGPT for about 6 weeks as my go-to for small
         | questions (when is sunset in sf today? list currencies that
         | start with the letter P, convert this timestamp PDT to GMT,
         | when is the end of Q1 2025?) and it's been great/99% accurate.
         | If there was ever a "google killer" I think it's the ad free
         | version of ChatGPT with better web search.
         | 
         | Google started off with just web search, but now you can get
         | unit conversions and math and stuff. ChatGPT started in the
         | other direction and is moving to envelope search. Not being
         | directed to sites that also majority serve google ads is a
         | double benefit. I'll gladly pay $20/30/mo for an ad free
         | experience, particularly if it improves 2x in quality over the
         | next year or two. It's starting to feel like a feature complete
         | product already.
        
         | r00fus wrote:
         | > In those visions, users simply asked questions and received
         | reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever.
         | 
         | I mean, Star Trek is a fictional science-fantasy world so it's
         | natural that tech works without a hitch. It's not clear how we
         | get there from where we are now.
        
         | pojzon wrote:
         | We will get there when ppl move past capitalism and socialism.
         | Like an ant colony pushing into one direction. It will happen,
         | but we need few more global dying events / resets. I believe
         | human race can get there but not in current form and state of
         | mind.
        
         | parsimo2010 wrote:
         | there still has to be some ranking feature for the backend
         | search database to return the top n results to the LLM. So
         | pagerank isn't over, it's just going to move to a supporting
         | role, and probably modified as the SEO arms race continues.
        
         | righthand wrote:
         | > those visions, users simply asked questions and received
         | reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever.
         | 
         | It's a fallacy then. If my mentor tells me something I fact
         | check it. Why would a world exist where you don't have to fact
         | check? The vision doesn't have fact checking because the
         | product org never envisioned that outlier. A world where you
         | don't have to check facts, is dystopian. It means the end of
         | curiosity and the end of "is that really true? There must be
         | something better."
         | 
         | You're just reading into marketing and not fact checking the
         | reality in a fact-check-free world.
        
           | mulmen wrote:
           | If you can't trust the result of a query how can you trust
           | the check on that query which is itself a query? If no
           | information is trustworthy how do you make progress?
        
         | lofaszvanitt wrote:
         | Kagi also drinks the koolaid, namely the knowledge navigator
         | agent bullshite.
         | 
         | "The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so!"
         | 
         | ---
         | 
         | Brrrr... someone is hell-bent on the extermination of the last
         | aspects of humanity.
         | 
         | Holy crap, this will be next armageddon, because people will
         | further alienate themselves from other people and create layers
         | of layers of unpenetrable personal bubbles around themselves.
         | 
         | Kagi does the same what google does, just in a different
         | packaging. And these predictions, bleh, copycats and shills in
         | a nicer package.
        
         | itissid wrote:
         | This product vision stupidity is present in every one of
         | googles products. Maps has _feed_ for some reason. The search
         | in it for what I want is horrendous. There is no coherence
         | between time(now) and what a person can do around the current
         | location.
         | 
         | Navigation is the only thing that works but wayz was way better
         | at that and the only reason they killed(cough bought it) was to
         | get the eyeballs to look at feed.
        
         | coffeemug wrote:
         | Thinking about incentive alignment, non ad-based search would
         | be better than ad-based, but there'd still be misalignment due
         | to the problem of self-promotion. Consider Twitter for example.
         | Writing viral tweets isn't about making money (at least until
         | recently), but the content is even worse than SEO spam. There
         | is also the other side of the problem that our monkey brains
         | don't want content that's good for us in the long run. I would
         | _love_ to see (or make) progress in solving this, but this
         | problem is really hard. I thought about it a lot, and can't see
         | an angle of attack.
        
           | HDThoreaun wrote:
           | Theres the counter incentive of not wanting to piss off your
           | paying customers though. I think the monkey brain incentive
           | is a much harder problem.
        
         | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
         | Yes the incentives will need to change. I think it's also going
         | to be a bigger question than just software. What do we do in
         | general about those that control capital or distribution
         | channels and end up rent seeking? How do others thrive in that
         | environment?
         | 
         | In the short term, I wonder what happens to a lot of the other
         | startups in the AI search space - companies like Perplexity or
         | Glean, for example.
        
         | nikcub wrote:
         | I now only use Google for local search.
         | 
         | Regarding incentives - with Perplexity, ChatGPT search et al.
         | skinning web content - where does it leave the incentive to
         | publish good, original web content?
         | 
         | The only incentivised publishing today is in social media
         | silos, where it is primarily engagement bait. It's the new SEO.
        
       | jameslk wrote:
       | What's the benefit for websites to allow OpenAI/Microsoft to
       | scrape and republish all their content without sending traffic
       | back to them? It seems like these type of "search engines" will
       | just get blocked in the short term.
       | 
       | Longer term, it seems what will be left is "AI Optimized"
       | content, which turns LLM search engines into shills for
       | advertisers. Or these new search engines will have to compensate
       | content producers somehow.
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | This is probably powered by Bing indexes. I doubt many would
         | intentionally exclude themselves from Bing. I suspect Gemini is
         | the same, using Google's index.
        
       | sergiotapia wrote:
       | It's crazy how much "vibes" affect perception of the product.
       | OpenAI just always feels cold and alien to me. Compared to
       | Anthropic and Perplexity's warmth.
        
       | jmakov wrote:
       | So basically what phind.com has been doing all the time?
        
       | niemandhier wrote:
       | I just checked, there are a lot of topics it will refuse to
       | generate search results for.
       | 
       | Sure normal search is policed too, but usually not based on moral
       | judgments but on legal necessities.
        
       | josefritzishere wrote:
       | They're trying to find new places to cram their money-suck of a
       | product in hope of pretending there is a revenue model.
        
       | ncrtower wrote:
       | If you ask ChatGPT which search engine it uses, it will tell you
       | Bing. And only Bing.
        
       | notkoalas wrote:
       | A lot of people are focusing on its reliance on existing SEO -
       | but they say right in the post that they're integrating directly
       | with data brokers more. They're subtly arguing for the
       | elimination of a certain kind of middle man.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | I don't see a way for websites to monetize giving this content to
       | openAI. This is not 2001 anymore, people should not expect to
       | give away this information for nothing. I would be blocking
       | openai bots ASAP
        
       | guluarte wrote:
       | I've been saying the biggest treat to google are LLMs
        
       | stonethrowaway wrote:
       | This time it's different and it changes everything and it's our
       | best one yet.
        
       | _sys49152 wrote:
       | is this going to give me lyrics or recipes link or will these
       | categories continue to be nerfed by openai? it appears to write
       | over its response of providing me a website link and gives me an
       | unclickable blue name of website instead.
        
         | numbers wrote:
         | Lyrics aren't possible due to copyright restrictions (according
         | to ChatGPT). I wonder what else won't be easy to find on here.
        
       | santiagobasulto wrote:
       | This is great news. But it gives me anxiety the fact that I'll
       | keep accumulating chats on that left bar without any ways to
       | manage them or search through them.
       | 
       | Today I was looking for an old (and useful) chat I had a few
       | months ago and I had to export the whole chat history, wait for
       | the zip file, and write a Python script to find what I was
       | looking for :/
        
       | Pesthuf wrote:
       | Bing search gets so much dumber when it searches the web that
       | I've developed the muscle memory to append #nosearch to every
       | prompt so that hopefully it won't. I just searches for unrelated
       | stuff and then repeats random stack overflow answers to problems
       | that have nothing to do with what I asked.
        
       | xyst wrote:
       | Still do not like that ChatGPT does not want to provide sources
       | to the answers.
       | 
       | I provided a query to a _somewhat_ common question with Java apps
       | and TLS:
       | 
       | Query:
       | 
       | > identify root cause of this Java exception: PKIX path building
       | failed:
       | sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException:
       | unable to find valid certification path to requested target
       | 
       | Answer:
       | 
       | > The exception you're encountering, PKIX path building failed,
       | typically indicates an issue with SSL/TLS certificate validation.
       | Specifically, the error unable to find valid certification path
       | to requested target suggests that the Java application cannot
       | find a trusted certificate for the server it is trying to connect
       | to. Here are the common root causes and solutions:
       | 
       | Missing Certificate in Truststore: The server's SSL certificate
       | (or the certificate of its issuing authority) is not present in
       | the Java truststore. Solution: Import the server's certificate
       | into the Java truststore using the keytool command. You can
       | obtain the certificate by using a browser or tools like openssl.
       | Self-Signed Certificate: If the server is using a self-signed
       | certificate, it won't be trusted by default. Solution: Again,
       | import the self-signed certificate into the Java truststore.
       | Incorrect Truststore Configuration: The application might be
       | pointing to an incorrect truststore or not configured to use one
       | at all. Solution: Ensure the application is configured to use the
       | correct truststore and that the path is correctly set. Expired
       | Certificate: The certificate used by the server might be expired.
       | Solution: Check the server's certificate validity and renew it if
       | necessary. Intermediate Certificates Missing: If the server's
       | certificate chain is incomplete (i.e., missing intermediate
       | certificates), it can lead to this error. Solution: Ensure that
       | the complete certificate chain is presented by the server or
       | manually import any missing intermediate certificates. Network
       | Issues: There may be issues with the network or firewalls
       | blocking access to the certificate validation services. Solution:
       | Check network configurations and ensure proper access. To
       | troubleshoot further, you can enable Java SSL debugging by adding
       | the following JVM argument:
       | 
       | bash Copy code -Djavax.net.debug=ssl This will provide more
       | detailed output regarding the SSL handshake and help identify the
       | specific issue.
       | 
       | It's not a bad suggestion, these are my usual go-tos when
       | diagnosing cause.
       | 
       | But then a query into what the sources are for this information
       | is:
       | 
       | > The information is based on common knowledge about Java
       | security, SSL/TLS configurations, and best practices for handling
       | certificates. It reflects general principles and troubleshooting
       | steps recognized in Java development and security documentation.
       | If you're looking for specific references, the Oracle
       | documentation on Java security and the keytool command, as well
       | as community forums and resources on SSL/TLS issues, often cover
       | these topics.
       | 
       | "It's just common knowledge bro. RTFM"
        
       | kernal wrote:
       | what time is it?
       | 
       | >Currently, I don't have access to real-time data like time and
       | date. You can check the time on your device or search "current
       | time" online for the latest local time wherever you are.
       | 
       | Oh dear, we're off to a bad and slow start already.
        
         | JSDevOps wrote:
         | The world is literally on fire and we are setting fire to more
         | forests because AI can't tell the time and date
        
       | marckrn wrote:
       | OpenAI also provides a Chrome Extension
       | (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-search/ejcf...)
       | to trigger a search from the omnibar as the default search
       | engine.
       | 
       | If you don't like that (like I do), you can also manually add it
       | under Site Search using
       | 
       | https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&hints=search
        
         | serjester wrote:
         | I tried hacking this together a month ago as an experiment and
         | it was super painful. This seems like exactly what I wanted -
         | props to OpenAI. Google should be on DEFCON 2.
        
         | modeless wrote:
         | First impression: Far too slow to replace Google Search for
         | this use. I frequently get 5+ seconds of waiting before the
         | first word of a response shows up, vs. less than 1 for Google
         | (which is not as fast as it used to be). OpenAI has a lot of
         | work to do on latency.
         | 
         | I can definitely see this new search feature being useful
         | though. The old one was already useful because (if you asked)
         | you could have it visit each result and pull some data out for
         | you and integrate it all together, faster than you could do the
         | same manually.
         | 
         | It's often hobbled by robots.txt forbidding it to visit pages,
         | though. What I really want is for it to use my browser to visit
         | the pages instead of doing it server side, so it can use my
         | logged-in accounts and ignore robots.txt.
        
         | zurfer wrote:
         | nice thank you. I just added that as a custom search to alfred
         | (on mac). Works well!
        
       | whizzter wrote:
       | 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 algorithmic purity if one
       | is to believe the reports of their internal politics and if those
       | are true they have probably lost a ton of people who they'd need
       | right now to turn the ship around quickly.
        
         | thefourthchime wrote:
         | Google's SEO almost killed the web, ChatGPT Search will finish
         | the job.
        
           | kylebenzle wrote:
           | We are still spending most of our time online on social media
           | sites like Hacker News, Instagram and Youtube, right?
        
             | topaz0 wrote:
             | That's not the web
        
               | Retr0id wrote:
               | Why not?
        
               | cryptoz wrote:
               | I'll take a stab at it. What is the web, really? Gotta be
               | stuff you see and interact with in web browsers right?
               | Sure, you can get to HN, YouTube and Instagram in a
               | browser. But by traffic for example, how much of activity
               | on HN, Instagram and YouTube combined is through a
               | browser? I mean, gotta be pretty low...like 5%? Just a
               | guess, but remember all the app usage and TV usage for
               | those sites is pretty big.
               | 
               | So if 95% of traffic/users/whatever metric are not using
               | a web browser for those activities, is it really the web?
               | It can't be called the web just 'cause they use HTTPS.
               | It's gotta be a 'world wide web' experience, which I
               | think a good proxy for would be using a web browser.
               | 
               | I got no horse in this race, just thinking out loud about
               | it.
        
               | s1artibartfast wrote:
               | I think the idea is that those are websites on the web,
               | which are distinct from the web itself.
               | 
               | There are several meaningful difference between surfing
               | Youtube and surfing the web. These include ownership,
               | access, review, exposure, and more.
        
           | hidelooktropic wrote:
           | How?
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | Classic innovator's dilemma. The politics of Google make
         | launching a search competitor impossible.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | Exactly. That's why I never understood Gemini. It is in a
           | zero-sum game with Search.
        
         | zo1 wrote:
         | Google, even with all the trillions in additional productivity
         | it has added to the world, has left the world at a net-
         | negative. We can't even quantify it, and every person will tell
         | you a different way in which it has impacted the world
         | negatively.
         | 
         | E.g. for me, how much Google (and silicon valley in general)
         | have enabled twisted ideologies to flourish. All in search of
         | ad-dollars by virtue of eyeballs on screens, at the detriment
         | of everything.
        
           | olkingcole wrote:
           | I was just wondering what has come out of silicon valley
           | since say 2003 that has been a net positive for humanity.
           | Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it's
           | progress.
        
           | topaz0 wrote:
           | Now we get to see how OpenAI will do similar harm, more
           | effectively and at much greater environmental cost.
        
         | throwaway314155 wrote:
         | > if one is to believe the reports of their internal politics
         | 
         | I'm not familiar with what you're referring to here. Happen to
         | have a link?
        
           | carls wrote:
           | There are probably several, but one of the ones that made the
           | rounds a while ago is "The Man Who Killed Google Search" by
           | Edward Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-
           | killed-google/
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | Prabhakar Raghavan got fired (= promoted out of the job)
             | last week.
        
         | rawgabbit wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | 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).
        
           | nosbo wrote:
           | Is it optimising for all users? And assuming people thumbs up
           | the correct info. I wonder what accuracy percentage we are
           | looking at there. ChatGPTs responses are so confident when
           | wrong I fear people will just give it a thumbs up when its
           | wrong. (This is if how I understand the feature you mention
           | is working)
        
         | umvi wrote:
         | 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 query.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | I think this is a separate issue although it also exists.
           | 
           | What the parent is referring to is favoring annoying ad-
           | filled garbage over an equally relevant but straightforward
           | result.
           | 
           | The hidden variable is that ad-riddled spam sites also invest
           | in SEO, which is why they rank higher. I am not aware of any
           | evidence that Google is using number of Google ads as a
           | ranking factor directly. But I would push back and say that
           | "SEO" is something Google should be doing, not websites, and
           | a properly optimized search engine would be penalizing
           | obvious garbage.
        
           | greenavocado wrote:
           | 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 man in the picture and gives up.
           | 
           | Youtube recommendations is always hundreds of videos i've
           | watched already, with maybe 1-2 recommendations to new
           | channels when i know there's millions of content creators out
           | there struggling who it will never introduce me to. What
           | happened to the rabbit holes of crazy youtube stuff you could
           | go down?
           | 
           | This product is a shell of its old self, why did it stop
           | working?
        
             | seanthemon wrote:
             | They do evil now
        
             | IshKebab wrote:
             | 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 happy
             | with Google Search.
        
         | kristopolous wrote:
         | 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 their stations.
         | 
         | It becomes Clayton Christensenesque - they're dismissive of the
         | competition as not real threats and don't realize their cash-
         | cow is running on only fumes and inertia until its too late.
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | No it's not.
        
         | coffeemug wrote:
         | Google is entirely to blame. It would be trivial for them to
         | train a model to rank sites on a scale of SEO garbage to nobel
         | laureate essay, then filter out the bottom 50%.
        
       | taytus wrote:
       | Maybe I'm alone on this, but I genuinely believe that SEO ruined
       | the web.
        
       | okasaki wrote:
       | I was hoping this would be a search engine to search across your
       | chatgpt conversations, but no.
        
       | niek_pas wrote:
       | I'm a little confused: I've searched the web with ChatGPT before.
       | How is this different?
        
         | kingstoned wrote:
         | It's not that different, Google's Gemini already provides this
         | functionality where they have source/links in their
         | responses...
        
         | chankstein38 wrote:
         | Same here. I ask it to search all of the time. I guess maybe
         | now it is required to provide sources? It usually did before
         | but there were times it didn't so maybe the update is that it's
         | required to?
        
       | AcerbicZero wrote:
       | I don't mean this in a bad way, but seriously, about time. This
       | was the best use case for LLMs on day one, imo.
        
       | surfingdino wrote:
       | AdSense/AdWords-like network too? Really curious how it would
       | work in ChatGPT Search.
        
       | throw_pm23 wrote:
       | ok, so you now have to type "What's the weather in Positano?",
       | because typing "Positano weather" into Google was too difficult.
        
       | jorblumesea wrote:
       | It's great we chose LLMs for this. You know, a model that is
       | completely accurate and has no hallucination problems whatsoever.
        
       | _andrei_ wrote:
       | 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
        
         | cvburgess wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | grayprog wrote:
       | I searched for what are the top stories in HN today and one of
       | the results was that OpenAI released ChatGPT 5? WTF? Also about
       | Rust 2.0. Also, the sources listed were strange, not HackerNews,
       | although it did list Hackernews URL on top, but not in sources.
       | https://imgur.com/a/AoFiEQt
        
       | nige123 wrote:
       | OOF
       | 
       | Smell that!? A large part of Google's search business is on fire
       | right now!
       | 
       | There are three types of search: informational, transactional and
       | navigational.
       | 
       | LLM's are competing hard and fast for informational search. Once
       | upon a time we offered 2.5 keywords to the Google Gods only to be
       | ultimately passed to stackoverflow.
       | 
       | That game is up. Google is losing it faster than you can say,
       | "anti-competitive practices in the search engine industry."
       | 
       | Transactional and navigational search remain.
        
       | data_spy wrote:
       | I did a simple test of "Chicago Velodrome", it provided something
       | that has been closed since 2016, Google gave a better result of
       | something that is actually around but in the Chicagoland area
        
       | neillyons wrote:
       | Definitely "Code Red" for Google Search
        
       | utilityhotbar wrote:
       | I consider it very characteristic of Silicon Valley that nobody
       | can think of a more immediately useful task for something
       | supposedly capable of multi-stage intelligent planning and
       | execution other than "plan me a vacation to X location". Are all
       | of their hundreds of millions of prospective customers all
       | software engineers with long holidays and too much disposable
       | income xD
        
       | snadal wrote:
       | I would be happy if I could search my previous ChatGPT
       | conversations! :)
        
       | galvanizednuts wrote:
       | Has there been any indication on whether or not adtech is
       | mobilizing to integrate with LLMs to provide "promoted"
       | responses? I'm shocked it isn't already a burgeoning area for new
       | startups
       | 
       | It sucks but it'll happen for sure
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | notice conspicuous lack of New York Times. the partner vs lawsuit
       | stakes of traditional media vs openai are playing out now.
        
       | topaz0 wrote:
       | The costs are too great. We can't go on like this.
        
       | stephc_int13 wrote:
       | The reason this is so appealing is because Google is almost
       | useless these days.
        
       | alexawarrior4 wrote:
       | Tried "Sailflow Galveston Bay", which for google search returns
       | the Galveston Bay / Kemah wind/weather report for sailing in the
       | area. For GPT Search, returned the Galveston Buoy as the first
       | result, which is WRONG, as it is 10+nm off the coast of Galveston
       | with often VERY different weather than Galveston Bay. The second
       | GPT search result was just the Sailflow home page.
       | 
       | So in this case at least, GPT Search is far inferior and
       | dangerously incorrect were someone to rely on these search
       | results for weather information.
        
         | rafram wrote:
         | It returns the same result as Google for me. I'll take your
         | word for it re: the importance.
        
       | svara wrote:
       | What is currently considered the state of the art when building
       | things like this?
       | 
       | I've heard people find RAG not to work very well, is that
       | accurate? Is it just about using the right embeddings?
       | 
       | I suppose ideally you just put the sources in the context window,
       | which becomes limiting with large amounts of text?
        
       | gwbas1c wrote:
       | Phind kinda-sorta did this. For awhile I used it as my primary
       | search, but limitations made me go back to Google.
       | 
       | Hopefully ChatGPT's version works very well. Phind was more of a
       | kludge to demonstrate what combining chat AI and search can do.
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | We're working on a complete redesign of Phind to make it more
         | of a search competitor :)
         | 
         | What were the limitations you ran into?
        
       | suyash wrote:
       | We need this type of disruption for :
       | 
       | 1. Mobile apps: Don't want to see intrusive apps
       | 
       | 2. YouTube: Don't want to be interrupted with ads and no I don't
       | want to buy premium service.
        
       | jscottbee wrote:
       | Is a web search worth the added power requirements? In the USA,
       | limits are being placed on AI use in data centers due to the lack
       | of generation to cover it all.
        
       | mbreese wrote:
       | I've been starting to see a shift in my use of ChatGPT. Over the
       | past few months, I've started using it more for "knowledge"
       | questions (eg: Can you give me a list of genes involved in
       | disease X?). Where before I would have used Google for such a
       | thing, LLMs have gotten good enough that for quick searches, they
       | are "good enough". Yes, you still need to validate the results,
       | but it's usually a very good start.
       | 
       | Bonus points for then being able to ask for the results in a
       | specific format.
       | 
       | I'm looking forward to seeing how a feature built search engine
       | starts to look.
        
       | summerlight wrote:
       | I don't understand those people who hope that LLM-based search
       | will reduce or eliminate ads in search results. And that's not
       | going to happen. You're conflating two orthogonal problems. In
       | fact, LLM is much more expensive so you will need more aggressive
       | ads to fund it. And ads in LLM based search engine will be harder
       | to remove since it's deeply ingrained in the generated result.
       | 
       | The fundamental problem is that ads based business model is much
       | more lucrative then subscription based one. It's even more
       | extreme when you take account of a prospective view, since you
       | have control on ads shown which gives you a large margin for
       | future revenue improvements compared to rigid subscription
       | models. Unless you have a way to change this dynamic, you're
       | going to eventually see ads in search results, regardless of its
       | format.
        
       | benbristow wrote:
       | I thought this would be more like an actual search engine (like
       | Google with ChatGPT built in). Microsoft have been doing similar
       | with Copilot since it's inception, albeit they seem to have
       | removed the web search functionality with the latest update.
        
       | arealaccount wrote:
       | Using language models to summarize search results seems like a
       | great use for LLMs. Summarize all of the 50 pages of SEO spam and
       | maybe you will get what you're looking for.
        
       | kensai wrote:
       | Meanwhile at Google HQ: I felt a great disturbance in the Force,
       | as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were
       | suddenly silenced...
        
       | asah wrote:
       | I turned on search the web to compare vs google search + AI labs,
       | and ran a battery of typical tests. Google was instantaneous vs
       | gpt-4o which wrote out each letter.
       | 
       | Subjectively, I'm not switching for quick searched - google
       | remains lightning fast and is good enough. But I already use
       | gpt/claude/etc for conceptual searches and deeper analysis.
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | [used leica q3] ==> google (product listings and website; Chatgpt
       | told me _about_ the Leica q3 and mentioned ebay)
       | 
       | [value of mac air m1] ==> neither!! (google was useless videos
       | and crap; chatgpt gave me a price range and useful explanation...
       | which made no sense - used was the same price or higher than
       | new!)
       | 
       | [vogue lyrics] ==> google wins (gave me the lyrics; Chatgpt
       | whined about copyright restrictions and sent me to a youtube
       | video)
       | 
       | [weather in nyc] ==> tie (both provided correct, rich detail
       | about the current weather)
       | 
       | [root causes of ww1] ==> tie (both identified Militarism,
       | Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism, explained each and then
       | mentioned the assassination of the Archduke as the triggering
       | event)
       | 
       | [bohemia to midtown] ==> equally bad (both figured out that it's
       | a request for local directions, but neither just gave me
       | directions until I gave a specific destination)
       | 
       | [bohemia to penn station] ==> ??? (chatgpt correctly gave me
       | bohemia ny where google picked some obscure local listing; otoh
       | chatgpt wrote out directions where google gave me a nice map)
       | 
       | [btc to usd] ==> tie (both got today's price)
       | 
       | [what time is it in stockholm] ==> tie (both got it right)
       | 
       | [iphone 16 vs 14] ==> chatgpt wins (nice comparison; google
       | didn't pop search labs and just gave me websites)
       | 
       | [ffmpeg to clip the last 3 secs of a video] ==> chatgpt ?! (I
       | didn't love either answer TBH)
       | 
       | [456+789] ==> google (both gave the answer, but google included a
       | nice calculator)
       | 
       | ...and the stuff people really want:
       | 
       | [porn] ==> google (gpt whined about policy violations; google
       | gave pornhub and other "useful" results)
        
       | janandonly wrote:
       | Very silly question, no doubt, but why don't we train LLM's
       | language skills on internet fluff, and actual knowledge only on
       | some reputable sources like Wikipedia and Britannica?
        
       | rsync wrote:
       | 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
       | published it on the web)
       | 
       | One conclusion is that the web indexing is relatively shallow.
       | 
       |  _However_ ...
       | 
       | "Where does the founder of rsync.net live?"
       | 
       | A. "John Kozubik, the founder and CEO of rsync.net, resides in
       | the San Francisco Bay Area."
       | 
       | ... and the source is kozubik.com ... which means they _did_
       | index my page but only retain, or weight, some of it ?
       | 
       |  _Meanwhile_ ... ublock showing  >3k denials during this five
       | minute interaction. I guess we can conclude something about where
       | they are directing their time and energy.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.kozubik.com/personal/misc.txt
        
       | rurban wrote:
       | I just detected perplexity for a proper AI search yesterday. My
       | test question today was: Which cbmc solver is multi-threaded?
       | 
       | Perplexity gave me the correct and best answers, with links to
       | the relevant arxiv papers.
       | 
       | The new ChatGPT search gave me only cadical as answer, plus 2
       | irrelevant wrong answers (not multi-threaded), but missed all
       | other multi-threaded solvers. => It's crap.
       | 
       | Neither Google nor ddg gave me any relevant links. Couldn't try
       | kagi, since my trial phase is over.
       | 
       | Looks like the fellow who was invited to the Google funeral was
       | right. Google search is dead.
        
         | Bromeo wrote:
         | Kagi answers that there is "CBMC", which is single-threaded,
         | but that there are extensions "Deagle" and "Yogar-CBMC" that
         | provide multi-threading for CBMC. It gives links to the papers
         | for all three, however some of them are closed access (or in
         | other words, fact checked, unlike arxiv).
        
         | Etheryte wrote:
         | It's hard to cross check since you didn't mention what you
         | consider are good answers, but the quick answer snippet on Kagi
         | says:
         | 
         | > The Yogar-CBMC and JCBMC solvers are notable multi-threaded
         | variants of the CBMC (C Bounded Model Checker) framework: ...
         | 
         | Followed by further details and references. The search results
         | themselves look relevant and reasonable to me, but again,
         | outside my area of expertise.
        
           | rurban wrote:
           | Both are bad answers
        
       | aloer wrote:
       | There is so much value in blue links turning purple and showing
       | the same content on repeat visits.
       | 
       | This kind of permanence is a huge loss
        
       | impulser_ wrote:
       | Why would I use this over Google? This has the same problem as
       | Preplexity.
       | 
       | Google is instant, why would I wait for a bunch of text to
       | generate just to get basic information.
        
       | davidclark wrote:
       | > Ask a question in a more natural, conversational way
       | 
       | I think this might actually be my main pain point with LLMs.
       | Personally, I don't want this.
       | 
       | I understand it might be helpful for other people. But, I prefer
       | highly specific, advanced search functionality, such as site: or
       | filetype: in google/ddg searches.
       | 
       | scryfall.com for magic the gathering cards is a great example.
       | I'd much prefer typing a few brief flags such as "id=r" instead
       | of "Get me all red identity cards." And I know I'm getting _all_
       | red identity cards with scryfall's current search functionality.
       | 
       | They are also composable, so I can add/drop ones easily instead
       | of perfectly rephrasing a whole sentence because I wanted to
       | change one clause.
       | 
       | I'd need the same level of trust in the LLM's filtering
       | capabilities as I do in those boolean or regex matching field
       | filters. An escape hatch to hard filters probably would be best
       | for my experience searching things.
        
       | gsemyong wrote:
       | It's creepy how fast you can find lots of information about any
       | person using this. I think something should be done about that.
        
       | epolanski wrote:
       | How does it go around websites scraping limitations?
       | 
       | I've tried Gemini flash, given it links to websites but it
       | claimed to have knowledge, or be able to read it only so many
       | times (kind of query, "summarize https://foo-bar/news-1")
        
       | submeta wrote:
       | Just compared it to Perplexity which offers web search, can use
       | many models to process the results, and presents results more
       | beautifully.
       | 
       | So ChatGPT's search looks rather rudimentary compared with
       | Perplexity.
        
       | Marius_Manola wrote:
       | So, should we expect Perplexity to post that "OpenAI killed my
       | startup" kind of article? (just saying)
        
       | nelox wrote:
       | Will OpenAI pay Apple around USD$20bn per year to be the default
       | search like Google?
        
       | nextworddev wrote:
       | What's funny is that web search was one of the first "chatgpt
       | plugins" in the market, which flopped terribly. This is basically
       | a rebrand of that.
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-31 23:00 UTC)