[HN Gopher] Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Thei...
___________________________________________________________________
Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from
the 2000s
Author : chuckwnelson
Score : 283 points
Date : 2024-12-28 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chuckwnelson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chuckwnelson.com)
| fratlas wrote:
| People want to spend less time on a task. Whichever tool succeeds
| at this will win.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Time on task only matters for the lowest paid. At high levels
| robust, predictable, and other characteristics compete strongly
| for value. Do you want the most accurate medical diagnosis or
| the fastest?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is that your typical search engine use case or are you more
| likely trying to find out when the taco stand opens?
| openrisk wrote:
| There is no "typical" search engine use case. The fallacy
| that there is such a thing is a big part of the problem.
| The enshittification and decline of the digital window to
| the internet is so complete that even basic information
| management tools like browser bookmarks are deprecated:
| people will "search" even for sites they use repeatedly.
|
| Minimally there needs to be a transparent split between
| commercial queries (searching to _buy_ something) and
| knowledge / abstract queries (searching to _learn_
| something).
|
| Users should be context aware (ideally using completely
| separate tools) of when they are simply accessing a pay-to-
| play online product catalog versus when they are querying
| what is effectively a decentralized wikipedia.
|
| Commingling the commercial with the factual was always
| going to be a dead-end.
| pessimizer wrote:
| So you want the answer to when the taco stand opens to be
| quick and wrong?
|
| That's possibly the biggest waste of my time you could
| think of, because I'm probably going to have to spend a
| half-hour and a trip out of the house finding out that the
| answer was wrong. I'd rather get the answer in 5 minutes
| and for it to always be right. Dying in an accident coming
| back from a taco stand AI didn't know closed 6 months ago
| would be the worst death.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Sadly, this is true. Getting the wrong answers quickly is
| valued more than having to work for the right answers.
|
| I fear the day that the poor kids who grew up believing
| everything LLMs hard out will reach a position of power.
| CM30 wrote:
| The question of course is how well that level of quality will
| hold up now that more and more of the internet is AI generated,
| and said AI generated content is being sourced for said AI tools.
| It feels like our choices are either to only get information from
| a certain time period or earlier, or to accept the information
| provided by Open AI and co is only going to get worse and worse
| over time...
| RF_Savage wrote:
| The Yahooification of Googles search becomes more amusing when
| one considers that it is now led buy the dude who ran Yahoo
| search to the ground.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Not anymore. Prabhakar was promoted from Head of Search to
| Chief Technologist whatever that means.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Prabhakar Raghavan was recently "promoted" out of that:
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Given how Vivek and Elon kicked the hornets nest about this, I
| wonder if there will be blow-back at Yahoo. A lot of people
| don't realize that Yahoo basically only survives today off the
| back of H1b labor.
| smt88 wrote:
| Every large tech company only survives because of H1b labor.
| binkHN wrote:
| > Enter 2024 with AI. The top 20% of search results are a wall of
| text from AI...
|
| I'll be the contrarian here and say I actually like Google's AI
| Overview? For the first time in a long time, I can search for an
| answer to a question and, instead of getting annoying ads and
| SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually get an answer.
|
| Google is finally useful again. That said, once Google screws
| with this and starts making search challenging again, as it has
| been for years, I'll go elsewhere.
| m_ke wrote:
| It would be great if it wasn't completely wrong 50% of the
| time.
| binkHN wrote:
| I find it mostly right 70% of the time.
| hobs wrote:
| Which would be great, except for that I found the top
| google result to be more than 70% relevant to my searches
| in the past, its a clear downgrade of relevancy.
| hinkley wrote:
| 60% of the time, it works every time.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Describes my general experience with AI across the board.
| Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It's like I'm talking to a
| genius toddler. With ChatGPT losing 5 billion dollars on 3.7B
| in revenue this is unsustainable. It feels like the dotcom
| bubble all over again.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This is true, but fairly or unfairly, asking a question to
| a chat bot feels like "opting in" to the possibility that
| the answers you get will be hallucinated garbage, in a way
| that doing a Google search does not. It's a tough problem
| for Google to overcome-- the fact that they will be held to
| a higher standard--- but that's what it is: we have already
| learned to accept bullshit from LLMs as a fact of life,
| whereas on the top of Google results it feels like an
| outrage.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I have been a paying ChatGPT user for awhile. It's simply
| a matter of saying "verify that" and it will give you wen
| citations
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It invents citations too, constantly. You could look up
| the things it cites, although at that point, what are you
| actually gaining?
|
| And I'm not saying this makes them useless: I pay for
| Claude and am a reasonably happy customer, despite the
| occasional bullshit. But none of that is relevant to my
| point that the bots get held to a different standard than
| Google search and I don't see an easy way for Google to
| deal with that.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Do you pay for ChatGPT? The paid version of ChatGPT has
| had a web search tool for ages. It will search the web
| and give you live links.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| ChatGPT has had web search for exactly 58 days. I guess
| our definitions of 'ages' differ by several orders of
| magnitude.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| The _paid_ version has had web access for at least a year
|
| March 23rd 2023
|
| https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/
|
| That's 666 days.
|
| So you are off by over "one order of magnitude"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Aren't those citations sometimes entirely made up? Like
| the lawyers who used it for a case and it cited ones that
| never happened?
| JustExAWS wrote:
| No, ChatGPT has had a web search tool for paid users
| forever. It actually searches the web and you can click
| on the links
| robrenaud wrote:
| I really do think hallucinated references are a thing of
| the past. Models will still make things up, but they
| won't make up references.
|
| ChatGPT with web search does a good job of summarizing
| content.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _we have already learned to accept bullshit from LLMs
| as a fact of life, whereas on the top of Google results
| it feels like an outrage._
|
| Sort of. Top results for any kind of question that
| applies to general population - health, lifestyle, etc. -
| are usually complete bullshit too. It's all pre-AI slop
| known as _content marketing_.
| Kiro wrote:
| What are you using it for?
| jayd16 wrote:
| > genius toddler
|
| I think it's closer to a well spoken idiot.
| hinkley wrote:
| A cat who can talk.
| traverseda wrote:
| That's a very pessimistic take. It's right about 50% of the
| time!
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Both of your requirements for correctness are just 50% too
| high.
| jsheard wrote:
| The mark of a great product/feature is always when they feel
| the need to force it on users, because they _know_ that a
| significant portion of users would switch it off if they
| could.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Compared to 0% of relevant results in first 10 pages it's an
| enormous improvement.
| croes wrote:
| Wait till the monetizing by ads starts
| jayd16 wrote:
| Have you seen an example where the AI hits on something
| that isn't in the first 10 pages of results?
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Yeah the AI summaries are garbage still
| Schnitz wrote:
| The AI answers are nowhere near good enough to always be at the
| top, without any clear indication that they are just a rough
| guess. Especially for critical things like visa requirements or
| medical information. When you search Google for these sort of
| things, you want the link to the authoritative source, not a
| best guess. It's very different for queries like say "movies
| like blade runner".
| pishpash wrote:
| It seems damning enough that Google itself doesn't know what
| is a more authoritative source or they would have weighted
| their AI output appropriately.
|
| What does that say about their traditional search results?
| Schnitz wrote:
| I doubt that was the decision process. It's much more
| likely that there is a directive coming down from the top
| that "we need to go all in on AI", which then gets
| amplified down by middle management and the result is AI
| smeared over all results irregardless if helpful. That then
| drives up some vanity metric like "searches answered by AI
| summaries", while metrics like "bad AI summaries shown"
| don't get attention. As a result the organization is happy,
| people can get promoted, etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| agreed and frankly I am a big fan of LLMs in general... it
| just doesn't seem like the one behind google search is all
| that smart
| BadCookie wrote:
| An example: I was looking up what a good diet is to follow
| after a child has been vomiting. The AI said to avoid giving
| fruit juice ... yet the authoritative sources said the
| opposite. I already knew not to trust the AI, but this was
| nail in the coffin for me.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Not all queries are the same but I agree with you that the
| authority of source is crucial. That's why for example .gov
| sites rank high and should rank high because government is
| usually the most trusted source.
|
| But when you are looking for new shoes to buy or food recipes
| then .gov sites can't help you and that's where things get
| ugly....SEO spam ugly.
| asdff wrote:
| Were you not googling before? They had a bullet point summary
| that was actually more accurate because it scraped direct
| quotes from the website. Now I am getting wrong info from the
| ai summary. Its a huge step back from just what was there
| previously but its sold as some advancement.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It definitely didn't seem more accurate to me. If quite
| frequently either scraped quotes that weren't actually an
| answer to my search (the webpage was correct, but the link
| between my search and the webpage was not), or it was an
| answer but the answer was wrong (because the webpage was
| wrong).
|
| The AI summary now isn't perfect because it can still
| regurgitate wrong information from the Internet, or
| hallucinate information when there isn't any -- but it seems
| to actually understand what I want now, so it doesn't suffer
| from the incorrect matching problem.
|
| Also, there are way more AI answers now than there ever were
| snippet answers.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| My friend and I used to paste pre-AI Google search snippets
| to each other when they were so bad, especially when it
| quoted a comment on Reddit.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| ...i'm no fan of the google AI feature but it is way more
| accurate than the scraped bullet point predecessor which
| would often scrape things while missing something key like a
| "here is the opposite of what we are talking about:" in the
| webpage
| toddmorey wrote:
| For quick simple steps like how to get a Bluetooth keyboard
| into pairing mode, it seems to work really well. I hated the
| prior world where everyone attempted to hide the real answer
| 3/4ths of the way through a useless blog post or YouTube video.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Which, we should note, didn't happen 10 years ago before the
| accountants took over search at Google. Those good, lean,
| helpful pages still exist. Google incentives websites to have
| pages of slop on everything now because they track how long
| you spend on a site as a "metric of a good match". Forrest
| for the trees...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Stack overflow launched 16 years ago, when for many years
| most of google results already were expertexchange type of
| sites with the obfuscated answers hidden pages deep in the
| link.
| aix1 wrote:
| > expertexchange
|
| This reminded me that, rather hilariously, it used to be
| called expertsexchange.com before adding a dash (experts-
| exchange.com).
| hinkley wrote:
| Expert sex change will long be remembered. I recall there
| was an Italian site that had a very spicy "Le Tits Now"
| reading but it escapes me.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i think if anything by google actively penalizes long slip
| articles with lots of affiliate links
| hinkley wrote:
| Baking recipes are the fucking worst.
|
| I shouldn't have to read 2000 words to make a cheesecake.
| And I shouldn't have to read it three times before starting
| to make sure I combine the ingredients in the right order.
|
| Even the good ones are often subtly wrong. For example,
| never add baking powder or especially cinnamon to wet
| ingredients. Stir them into the dry ingredients first, then
| combine. Otherwise they clump. With cinnamon it makes it
| look bad. With chemically reactive ingredients it can lead
| to insufficient rise. Who taught you people to cook?
| Obviously not grandma or PBS.
|
| I see a lot of people blame "stale" baking powder and while
| that is a thing, mixing it in wrong or subbing oil for
| butter or not chilling (eg cookie dough) is just as likely
| a culprit.
|
| My friend made two sheets of cookies from the same batch
| and the second ones were terrible. She left the dough on
| the counter while the first batch was in the oven. Rookie
| mistake. And she has adult children.
| nicbou wrote:
| The answers come from the same websites. They just get stripped
| of their traffic. As someone who puts a ton of work into
| writing accurate, helpful guides, it's devastating to have my
| work plundered like that.
|
| Once these monopolies have successfully established themselves,
| they will become indistinguishable from the ad-invested
| websites they replace. The only difference is that they will
| create no new information of their own, and they will destroy
| the indieweb that once provided it.
| zblevins wrote:
| Where are you publishing your guides? Would love to add
| another bookmark to my collection.
| nicbou wrote:
| Unless you are thinking of moving to Germany, it might not
| be helpful to you.
|
| https://allaboutberlin.com
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Do you just like collecting links to online "guides" to
| anything? No preference for any subject matter, just a
| collection of random "guides"? Interesting, you could make
| a guide for that!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How are you monetizing your website? Is it with ads?
| rkagerer wrote:
| Who says they need to monetize it? Is that the only value
| we ascribe to traffic, now?
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Either I'm monetizing my site and I care about traffic or
| why else would I care if people visit my site as long as
| information gets out there?
| wrs wrote:
| If I had a site (no time lately to maintain one) it would
| be because I wanted to inform people and contribute to
| the world's accessible knowledge. I would want my
| information presented in context, accurately, the way I
| intended, not digested and reworded (often inaccurately)
| by Google.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| And how likely is someone to find your site through
| search instead of word of mouth?
|
| I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying
| you don't) and people knew you, you would get more
| traffic by putting a link in your profile here than
| people searching on Google.
| nicbou wrote:
| I can answer that question with actual numbers: 90% of my
| traffic comes from search engines. The remaining 10% is
| much more time-consuming to acquire. It doesn't help that
| external links are downranked by most social media sites.
| XCabbage wrote:
| Building a professional reputation? Letting people
| contact you with feedback and improvement suggestions?
| Pure personal pride? Plenty of reasons to want your work
| to be attributed to you regardless of whether you're
| directly monetising people reading it.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| And who is going to find or even care about these
| websites except for people going to them specifically
| because of a link to your profile on social media sites,
| through public talks or otherwise through word of mouth?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't understand what you're getting at. This thread
| concerns how we used to be able to find good information
| with these contraptions called search engines, so that
| word of mouth was not the only way information was found.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| What I'm getting at is simple, no one is going to find a
| random persons obscure blog where they are trying to
| build a "brand" or be a "thought leader" that is not on
| the first page of search results.
|
| I subscribe to Ben Thompson's writing and make it habit
| to go to a few other websites because they have earned my
| trust.
|
| The only method that most people have ever had of gaining
| traction is via word of mouth and not through search
| engines.
|
| No one owes you traffic or discoverability any more than
| they owed HuffPost or the other click bait, SEO optimized
| websites before the algorithm changes
| Steuard wrote:
| I don't know how old you are, or whether you ever really
| knew the web in the prior era that we're talking about.
| Forgive me if I'm making flawed guesses about where
| you're coming from.
|
| Back in the day, if I wanted the answer to some specific
| question about, say, restaurants in Chicago, I'd search
| for it on Google. Even if I didn't know enough about the
| topic to recognize the highest quality sites, it was
| okay, because the sorts of people who spent time writing
| websites about the Chicago restaurant scene _did_ know
| enough, and they mostly linked to the high-quality sites,
| and that was the basis of how Google formed its rankings.
| Word of mouth only had to spread among deeply-invested
| experts (which happens quite naturally), and that was
| enough to allow search engines to send the broader public
| to the best resources. So yeah, once upon a time, search
| engines were pretty darn good at pointing people to high
| quality sites, and a lot of those quality sites became
| well-known in exactly that way.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'm old enough that my first paid project was making
| modifications to a home grown Gopher server built using
| XCMDs for HyperCard.
|
| My first post was on Usenet in 1994 using the "nn"
| newsreader
|
| The web has gotten much larger than when it didn't exist
| when I started.
|
| But web rings on GeoCities weren't exactly places to do
| "high quality research". You still had to go to trusted
| sites you knew about or start at Wikipedia and go to
| citations.
|
| Before two years ago I would go to Yelp. Now I use the
| paid version of ChatGPT that searches the internet and
| returns sources with links
|
| https://imgur.com/a/hZwrjJS
| nicbou wrote:
| This whole website's raison d'etre was to provide neutral
| and accurate information about German immigration.
|
| > as long as information gets out there
|
| A possibly incorrect summary of the information gets out
| there. Given how much nuance I weave into my content, and
| how much effort I put into getting the phrasing just
| right, it frustrates me to no end. There's a very high
| likelihood that AI could give someone an invalid answer
| _and_ put my name under it, surrounded by their ads.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| And ChatGPT 4o (at least the paid version) and the AI
| overview in Google both give real time links to sources.
| Well at least you can ask the _paid_ version of ChatGPT
| to give you sources and it will do a web search
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I use Perplexity and it routinely confabulates while
| linking to the source it confabulates from. Parent has a
| valid gripe that AI is essentially damaging their
| reputation by pretending to cite its information with a
| credible source, I wish there were some legal avenue to
| sue but it's not quite libel is it?
| JustExAWS wrote:
| And you have the source as proof. But that says a lot
| about Perplexity.
|
| Does Perplexity actually give you a clickable link like
| ChatGPT does?
| pasttense01 wrote:
| It gives you clickable links to a half dozen or so
| sources. It's not clear which of the information comes
| from source 1 vs source 2, etc.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| And it's too much to verify the sources? When you use
| Google and search for something do you not have to go to
| multiple sources?
| vitaflo wrote:
| I've had numerous people contact me directly with follow
| up questions about various info I've put on my website.
| Many of those have turned into further conversations and
| collaborations.
|
| You can't have that if Google is plagiarizing your site
| and delivering the info.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| How many of those people found you by randomly searching
| Google versus via links via your profile on social media?
| mrkramer wrote:
| That's the real question, because younger generations use
| less and less Open Web.
|
| That was actually one of the main concerns of Larry Page
| back in the day, that the majority of Web's information
| might get and be locked behind walled gardens, paywalls
| or whatever else.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| The web is just as "open" as it ever was. It is just as
| easy if not more so to create and host your own content.
|
| You're complaining about "discoverability" which hasn't
| been easy since 2000.
|
| The most successful independent writer today is probably
| Ben Thompson's "Stratechery"
|
| https://stratechery.com/about/
| https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/how-ben-
| thompson-...
|
| Through organic search, you probably won't find any of
| his free articles when searching for a topic on the first
| page. He had to put in the work over years and couldn't
| depend on Google.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and
| others are the missed opportunities for the Open Web.
| Google nor any other search engine can't crawl their
| information, so Web users who are not on the
| aforementioned sites are missing a lot of useful
| information and social dynamics that would otherwise take
| place on the Open Web.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| At least for Facebook, if the information is not publicly
| available via Google it's because the content creator has
| decided not to make their content public.
|
| Google very much can crawl information on Facebook and
| Instagram that people have made "public"
|
| As far as "social dynamics", do you remember Cambridge
| Analytics? Why would I want my social graph to be
| publicly available.
|
| It's bad enough that people have their contacts synced
| with Facebook.
| vitaflo wrote:
| All of them, because I'm not on any social media. I also
| mostly put obscure things on my website that aren't
| easily found elsewhere online, so very specific searches
| tend to end up on my site.
|
| Also probably why I get email from people visiting as
| it's one of the few places people can reference said
| info.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So you aren't willing to put in the work necessary to get
| your site recognized in 2024 and you don't see that as a
| problem?
| disqard wrote:
| Indeed, this is what I likened to a "Dark Forest":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42459246
| echelon wrote:
| It doesn't matter anymore. There won't be monetary reward,
| citation, personal brand building, or anything. Google just
| rips off the information, presents it as fact, and a
| visitor will never visit an author's original website
| again.
|
| Websites are training data and will become an anachronism.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| If I care about my "personal brand", what are the chances
| that people are going to find me organically on the web?
|
| If I want to get my name our there - which I don't - I'm
| going to post to LinkedIn, give in person talks at
| conferences, try to get on popular podcasts that have
| guests, etc.
| dageshi wrote:
| Presumably, because no other method than ads or affiliate
| links works...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What value does the traffic have for you? Is it lost revenue
| from ads? Or are you selling something? If you're selling
| something, then the AIs could very well be giving you more
| sales than they take away.
| nicbou wrote:
| I guide immigrants who settle in Germany
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Have you noticed a decline in sales from AIs? I'd think
| that for such a service, people who don't want to pay
| wouldn't pay you anyway even if they went to your website
| first for the information, and people who do want to pay
| will find your business through the AI.
| disqard wrote:
| I just checked out your website -- what a beautiful labor
| of love!
|
| Thank You For Making And Sharing :)
| warner25 wrote:
| But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two
| different things, aren't they? I realize that the trend has
| been going this way for a long time - probably since Ask Jeeves
| started blurring the line - and this is indeed how a lot of
| people try / want to use search engines, but still... I wish
| that Google (and competitors) would have separate pages for
| something like "Ask Google" vs. traditional search (where I
| want to find a particular document or quality content on a
| certain topic instead of just getting a specific answer).
|
| May I ask how old you are? I'm 38 and I've been trying hard to
| break my 10 year-old of the habit of just typing questions into
| search engines (or telling me to "Ask Google" whenever she asks
| me a question and I say, "Oh, I don't know").
| darknavi wrote:
| Yes, they very much are two different things.
|
| I loath products like Facebook, Messenger, Google Photos,
| etc. are turning their traditional "search" page/feature into
| a one-stop AI slop shop.
|
| All I want to do is find a specific photo album by name.
| the_snooze wrote:
| They're perfectly capable of implementing all the same
| search operators as 1990s Yahoo and 2000s Google. It's a
| solved problem.
|
| The issue is that they don't want to. They'd rather be a
| middleman offering you "useful recommendations" (that they
| or may not sell to the highest bidder) instead of offering
| you value.
| Arnt wrote:
| Are you suggesting that 2000d Google codebase would do a
| decent job against today's SEO?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I think the search and ad code base may not be explicitly
| co-mingled, but they are implicitly co-mingled. And
| return worse search results than the early 2000s code
| base.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Today's SEO isn't the reason, it's simply more profitable
| for Google to give you terrible search results.
|
| It makes no financial sense for Google to give you good
| search results and get you off Google as soon as
| possible.
|
| Instead, if they make you spend more time on Google due
| to having to go through more crappy results, they can
| sell more ads.
|
| Most people won't change search engine and will stomach
| it.
|
| Until ChatGPT happened and can save you the pain of
| having to use Googles search engine.
| griomnib wrote:
| The biggest reason SEO is profitable is because low
| quality sites run display ads. That is the lifeblood, and
| intrinsic motivation, for these sites to even exist.
|
| Google operates the largest display ads network. They
| literally *pay* websites for SEO spam, and take a very
| healthy cut off the top.
|
| I wish people would stop acting like Google has been in a
| noble battle against the spam sites, when those sites
| generate Google billions of dollars a year in revenue.
|
| The obvious question is, why would they ruin search for
| display? The answer is greed combined with hubris. They
| were able to double dip for years, but they killed the
| golden goose.
|
| Everybody with a brain knew this would happen when they
| bought Doubleclick, and it took longer than expected, but
| here we are.
| jostmey wrote:
| Agreed. So many times I have to put Wikipedia or Reddit
| behind my search to get anything useful out of google. So
| it can work. Google is clearly prioritizing junk over
| value
| masa331 wrote:
| Why don't you use Kagi?
| fl0id wrote:
| Probably because it costs money and it also likely also
| will quickly succumb to sloppification by experimenting
| with their own ai and having an unstable founder...
| masa331 wrote:
| I'm using it for about two years and i haven't seen any
| sloppification. I see it as a feature that it is a paid
| service because i hope it will be a sustainable model for
| them to keep it as it is. I think it's a no brainer to
| pay for it instead of all the suffering people describe
| here. The founder remark i don't get
| NBJack wrote:
| Not to discourage you, but note it took a while before
| Google succumbed. Hopefully Kagi will hold out.
| spikej wrote:
| I'd never heard of it until I just Googled it... Is it a
| better experience compared to DuckDuckGo with bang
| operators?
| masa331 wrote:
| Yes, it's great. I use it for about two years already and
| never had any problem. I went to search for something on
| Google like twice during that time.
| rmgk wrote:
| Would recommend to just try their 100 free searches.
| Their results are good, but it's hard to have an
| objective measure. For me, it's the little features that
| make it worth it (and that they have a forum for feature
| requests, and a proper changelog).
| NBJack wrote:
| I've been using it for a while now. It is marginally
| better, but not exactly night and day. It seems to
| struggle with intent at times, and others I just get the
| same bland results as the free engines. The privacy is a
| big plus however.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| If they provided what you're asking for you'd leave the
| site and look at fewer ads.
| echelon wrote:
| I get very wrong and dangerous answers from AI frequently.
|
| I just searched "what's the ld50 of caffeine" and it says:
|
| > 367.7 mg/kg bw
|
| This is the ld50 of rats from this paper:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461039/
|
| This is higher than the ld50 estimated for humans:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeinism
|
| > The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on individual
| sensitivity, but is estimated to be 150-200 milligrams per
| kilogram of body mass (75-100 cups of coffee for a 70
| kilogram adult).
|
| Good stuff, Google.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, in response to the same question
| posed by me ("what is the ld50 of caffeine"), Google's AI
| properly reported it as 150-200 mg/kg.
|
| I asked this about 1 minute after you posted your comment.
| Perhaps it learned of and corrected its mistake in that
| short span of time, perhaps it reports differently on every
| occasion, or perhaps it thought you were a rat :)
| pests wrote:
| I also got similar and just tried, we are posting within
| minutes.
|
| --
|
| The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is
| estimated to be 150-200 milligrams per kilogram of body
| mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a
| person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57
| milligrams per kilogram. Route of administration LD50
| Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw Dermal 2000 mg/kg bw Inhalation LC50
| combined: ca. 4.94 mg/L The FDA estimates that toxic
| effects, such as seizures, can occur after consuming
| around 1,200 milligrams of caffeine.
|
| There was a table in the middle there.
| raincole wrote:
| Perhaps Google AI reads HN at work just like us.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The median lethal dose (LD50) of caffeine in humans is
| estimated to be 150-200 milligrams per kilogram of body
| mass. However, the lethal dose can vary depending on a
| person's sensitivity to caffeine, and can be as low as 57
| milligrams per kilogram. Route of
| administration Oral 367.7 mg/kg bw
| Dermal >2000 mg/kg bw Inhalation LC50 combined:
| ca. 4.94 mg/L
|
| ref: https://i.imghippo.com/files/yeKK3113pE.png 13:25EST
| (by a Kagi shill ftr)
| hinkley wrote:
| That's the danger with thinking in terms of LD50.
|
| That's half the people in a caffeine chugging contest
| falling over dead. The first 911 call would be much much
| earlier. I doubt you'd get to 57 mg before someone
| thought they were having a heart attack (angina).
| griomnib wrote:
| LLM are non deterministic by nature.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Yes, that's the main issue as ideally they wouldn't be
| non-deterministic on well-established quantitative facts.
| griomnib wrote:
| But they can never be. RAG gets you somewhere, but it's
| still a pile of RNGs under a trenchcoat.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| >> ideally
| griomnib wrote:
| It's just not possible. You can do a lot with
| nondeterministic systems, they have value - but oranges
| and apples. They need to coexist.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| ideal (def. #2) = Existing only in the mind; conceptual,
| imaginary
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ideal
|
| (We're allowed to imagine the impossible.)
| richk449 wrote:
| Is this really true? The linear algebra is deterministic,
| although maybe there is some chaotic behavior with
| floating point handling. The non deterministic part
| mostly comes from intentionally added randomness, which
| can be turned off right?
|
| Maybe the argument is that if you turn off the randomness
| you don't have an LLM like result any more?
| alex_young wrote:
| Hmm my search returns "between 150 to 200 mg per kilogram",
| which is maybe more correct?
|
| Also, in what context is this dangerous? To reach dangerous
| levels one would have to drink well over 100 cups of coffee
| in a sitting, something remarkably hard to do.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > Also, in what context is this dangerous? To reach
| dangerous levels one would have to drink well over 100
| cups of coffee in a sitting
|
| some people use caffeine powder / pills for gym stuff
| apparently.
|
| someone overdosed and died after incorrectly weighing a
| bunch of powder.
|
| doubt it is a big leap to someone dying because they were
| told the wrong limits by google.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-60570470
|
| as ever, machine learning is not really suitable for
| safety/security critical systems / use cases without
| additional non-ML measures. it hasn't been in the past,
| and i've seen zero evidence recently to back up any claim
| that it is.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _some people use caffeine powder / pills for gym stuff
| apparently._
|
| At 200mg per pill, which is the strongest I had, I'd
| still have to down some 70+ pills in one go. Not strictly
| impossible, but not something you could possibly do by
| accident, and even for the purpose of early check-out, it
| wouldn't be my first choice.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| the problem isn't someone's intent (on purpose/by
| accident).
|
| it's intent (want to improve my gym performance so down a
| bunch of caffeine) combined with incorrect information
| gained from what is supposedly a trustworthy source (the
| limit presented is much higher than it actually is for
| humans).
| vidarh wrote:
| If they're searching for LD50, they're already setting
| themselves up for errors, even with the right
| information. The LD50 isn't a safe dose, after all, but
| the _mean_ lethal dose. While it 's not great if its
| wrong, if people search for an LD50 thinking it indicates
| what they can safely take, it's already going to be hard
| to protect them against themselves.
| vidarh wrote:
| An accident with it in powdered form is possible - people
| who use them are often used to pre-workout supplements
| tasting awful, and so might be prepared to down it as
| fast as possible - but it's a big enough volume of powder
| that it really is a freak accident.
|
| And if on purpose, using caffeine would just be
| staggeringly awful...
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't doubt the news article on this, but even with
| caffeine pills/powder it's near half a fistful to get to
| LD50 judging by my caffeine tablets. It's not impossible
| to consume, but it'd be distinctly unpleasant long before
| you get even anywhere close to dangerous levels.
|
| For my high-caffeine pre-workout powder, I suspect I'd
| vomit long before I'd get anywhere near. Pure caffeine is
| less unpleasant, but still pretty awful, which I guess is
| why we don't see more deaths from it despite the
| widespread use.
|
| I agree with you that there really ought to be caution
| around giving advice on safety-critical things, but this
| one really is right up there in freak accident territory,
| in the intersection of somewhat dangerous substances sold
| in a poorly regulated form (e.g. there's little reason
| for these to be sold as bulk powders instead of pressed
| into pills other than making people feel more macho
| downing awful tasting drinks instead of taking pills).
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder if they're thinking 200mg per kilo to trigger
| cell death. I have trouble believing a human heart
| surviving a dose of 50mg/kg. Half of them surviving four
| times that much? No. I don't believe it.
|
| Found an article about a teenager who died after three
| strong beverages. The coroner is careful to point out
| that this was likely an underlying medical condition not
| the caffeine. The health professional they interviewed
| claims 10g is lethal for "most" people, which would be
| 100-150mg/kg. That still seems like something an ER
| doctor would roll their eyes at.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Your example doesn't interact with the chicken littling
| in this thread.
|
| > The hearing was told the scales Mr Mansfield had used
| to measure the powder had a weighing range from two to
| 5,000 grams, whereas he was attempting to weigh a
| recommended dose of 60-300mg.
|
| Nothing to do with an LLM nor with someone not knowing
| the exact LD50 of caffeine. Just "this article contains
| someone dying of caffeine overdose, and we're talking
| about caffeine overdose here, therefore LLM is
| dangerous."
| hinkley wrote:
| This is why we let the pros do compounding. Slip a
| decimal point and you can kill yourself with many
| substances.
| beejiu wrote:
| Perhaps a more common question: "How many calories do men
| need to lose weight?"
|
| Google AI responded: "To lose weight, men typically need to
| reduce their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800
| calories"
|
| Which is obviously dangerous advice.
|
| IMO Google AI overviews should not show up for anything (a)
| medical or (b) numerical. LLMs just aren't safe enough yet.
| warner25 wrote:
| I think even when the answer is "right" in some sense, it
| should probably come within the context of a bunch of
| caveats, explanations, etc.
|
| But maybe I'm just weird. Oftentimes when my wife or kids
| ask me a question, I take a deep breath and start to say
| something like "I know what you're asking, but there's
| not a simple or straightforward answer; it's important to
| first understand ____ or define ____..." by which time
| they get frustrated with me.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > I think even when the answer is "right" in some sense,
| it should probably come within the context of a bunch of
| caveats, explanations, etc.
|
| Funnily enough, this is exactly what the LLM does with
| these questions. So well that people usually try to tweak
| their prompts so they don't have to wade through
| additional info, context, hedging, and caveats.
| layer8 wrote:
| So you are saying that Google should provide responses
| that are more likely to frustrate its users? ;)
| sroussey wrote:
| > Which is obviously dangerous advice.
|
| Same advice as my trainer gives me.
| simoncion wrote:
| Your trainer advises you to reduce your calorie intake to
| between 200 and 500 calories per day? [0] That sounds
| very, very hazardous for anything other than very short
| term use, and (given the body's inbuilt "starvation
| mode") probably counterproductive, even then.
|
| [0] Note that the robot suggested to reduce calorie
| intake by 1,500->1,800 calories, and the recommended
| calorie intake is 2,000.
| hinkley wrote:
| People losing weight are probably eating more than 2000
| per day to begin with. But if you go from 2800 down to
| 1500 you're already likely to exceed 3 lbs of weight loss
| per week that is recommended without doctor supervision.
| If you need to lose more than 150 lbs in a year because
| you're well past morbid obesity then you need staff, not
| just a food plan.
| Retric wrote:
| Did they say: reduce their daily calorie
| intake to 1,500 - 1,800 calories or reduce
| their daily calorie intake by 1,500 - 1,800 calories
|
| These are very different answers, unless you're consuming
| ~3,300 calories per day. These kinds of 'subtle' phrasing
| issue often results in AI mistake as both words are
| commonly used in advice but the context is really
| important.
| sroussey wrote:
| Oh yeah! No, reduce to not reduce by. Though at the time
| I was eating a few things that had high calories that I
| didn't realize so it would have been the same.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't see the problem with the answer, and the question
| is already garbage. Plus, the LLM hedges its advice with
| precautions.
|
| I get a pretty good summary when I paste the question
| into Google. It comes up with a ballpark but also gives
| precautions and info on how to estimate what caloric
| restriction makes sense for you within the first 3
| sentences.
|
| And all in a format someone is likely to read instead of
| clicking on some verbose search result that only answers
| the question if they read a whole article which they
| aren't going to do.
|
| This seems like really lame nit picking. And I don't
| think it passes the "compared to what?" test.
| Jaxan wrote:
| The question is garbage. But people will ask it with
| their best intentions and not know it's garbage.
| beejiu wrote:
| The basic problem is it says reduce "by 1,500 - 1,800"
| rather than "to 1,500 - 1,800" (not that that answer is
| much better). Yes, it's a garbage question, but the first
| answer is unsafe in all circumstances. The simplest
| solution here is to show nothing.
| trollbridge wrote:
| That explains why I haven't been losing weight!
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think that would explain why you're starving, not how
| you're not losing weight.
| griomnib wrote:
| Funny thing is you can train a small BERT model to detect
| queries that are in categories that aren't ready for AI
| "answers" with like .00000001% of the energy of an LLM.
| hansvm wrote:
| That's (obviously) a bit of an exaggeration. BERT is just
| another transformer architecture. Cut down from ~100
| layers to 1, ~1k dimensions to ~10, and ~10k tokens to
| 100, and you're only 1e6 faster / more efficient, still a
| factor of 10k greater than your estimate and also too
| small to handle the detection you're describing with any
| reasonable degree of accuracy.
| griomnib wrote:
| I literally have DistilBERT models that can do this exact
| task in ~14ms on an NVIDIA A6000. I don't know the
| precise performance per watt, but it's really fucking
| low.
|
| I use LLM to help with training data as they are great at
| zero shot, but after the training corpora is built a
| small, well trained, model will smoke an LLM in
| classification accuracy and are way faster - which means
| you can get scale and low carbon cost.
|
| In my personal opinion there is a moral imperative to use
| the most efficient models possible at every step in a
| system design. LLM are one type of architecture and while
| they do a lot well, you can use a variety of energy
| efficient techniques to do discrete tasks much better.
| hansvm wrote:
| Thanks for providing a concrete model to work with.
| Compared to GPT3.5, the number you're looking for is
| ~0.04%. I pointed out the napkin math because 0.00000001%
| was so obviously wrong even at a glance that it was
| hurting your claim.
|
| And, yes, purpose-built models definitely have their
| place even with the advent of LLMs. I'm happy to see more
| people working on that sort of thing.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| If your calorie intake is just 1500 today, it is bad
| advice. If your calorie surplus is 1800, it is good
| advice.
|
| But I wonder, were those few words the full response?
| Information hiding to prove a point is too easy.
| hansvm wrote:
| A calorie surplus of 1800/day is ~190 lbs/yr. Is that
| something people actually do?
| zaroth wrote:
| It's not even advice, and it's not wrong.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you're aiming to lose weight safely the rule of thumb
| is 3 lbs a week. 3000kcal per pound works out to an
| average deficit of about 1280 calories per day. Max.
|
| Obese people can lose a bit more under doctor
| supervision. My understanding is that it's tied partially
| to % of body weight lost per week and partly to what your
| organs can process, which does not increase with body
| mass.
| vidarh wrote:
| I get your point wasn't this specific example, it's perhaps
| not a very good example of being dangerous: Getting that
| much caffeine into your bloodstream takes quite a
| commitment, and someone who knows the term LD50 is perhaps
| not very likely to think it indicates what is safe to
| consume. It's also not something you're likely to do
| accidentally because you've looked it up online and decided
| to test it.
|
| In the most concentrated form in typical commercial
| caffeine tablets, it's half to one fistful. In high-
| caffeine pre-workout supplements, it's still a quantity
| that you'd find almost impossible to get down and keep
| down... E.g. a large tumbler full of powder of mine with
| just enough water to make it a thick slurry you'd likely
| vomit up long before much would make it into your
| bloodstream...
|
| I'm not saying it's impossible to overdose on caffeinated
| drinks, because some do, and you can run into health
| problems before that, but I don't think _that_ error is
| likely to be very high on the list of dangerous advice.
| nmeagent wrote:
| Yes, Google's AI chatbot confidently claimed yesterday that
| US passports have a fingerprinting requirement, which is
| absolutely not true. These things can't be trusted to emit
| even basic facts without somehow screwing it up and it's
| frankly depressing how they are worming their way into
| almost everything. I hope this particular hype train is
| derailed as soon as possible.
| hinkley wrote:
| Even that seems high. I don't feel good with 200mg per
| _human_ , not per kilo. I can't imagine drinking ten times
| as much and not being in the ER. A hundred times that much?
| No fucking way.
| vidarh wrote:
| Getting an answer to a question is a superset - the answer
| can be a page.
|
| Sometimes the answer we want is a specific page containing
| some term, but for most people, most of the time, I'd argue
| that getting a narrower piece of information is more likely
| to be valuable and helpful.
| croes wrote:
| It want stay long. You are now in the pre ad phase. As soon
| as the ads are integrated the answers will become worse.
| griomnib wrote:
| They have something Google never had: a paid tier.
|
| There are plenty of revenue models aside from ads.
| sobellian wrote:
| The excluded middle here is a paid tier that nevertheless
| serves you ads :(
| griomnib wrote:
| Google was originally fairly egalitarian, OpenAI never
| was, and never will be. For better or worse.
| croes wrote:
| MS already talks about ads for Copilot
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Obviously the future is to train the model with the ads,
| so that they're indistinguishable from the core of the
| answer.
|
| I kid, but also hope I'm wrong.
| griomnib wrote:
| Hm, m$ also runs a few giant adtech platforms, maybe they
| can just inject tracking code at the source.
| layer8 wrote:
| Streaming services have been introducing ads in their
| lower paid tiers. It will come eventually.
| ajross wrote:
| > But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two
| different things, aren't they?
|
| Google exists, as both a successful enterprise _and as a
| verb_ , precisely because to most people they are exactly the
| same thing.
|
| No, this is wrong. People ask what they want to know.
| Sometimes the best answer is a link. Sometimes it's just an
| answer. The ability to intuit which is best is what makes
| products in this space worth making.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > I've been trying hard to break my 10 year-old of the habit
| of just typing questions into search engines
|
| Honest question: why?
|
| I understand not wanting to use Google (the search engine) or
| not wanting to support Google (the company). But I don't see
| with the issue with just looking up questions.
|
| I'm 10 years younger than you, and I've been reaching for
| search engines first since I was 7, I think. Basically since
| I learned how to turn the computer on and open a web browser.
| warner25 wrote:
| Because I want her to find authoritative sources, read,
| learn, understand, think critically, etc. rather than
| taking a given answer at face value.
| fl0id wrote:
| For me: because that's exactly what Google and/or seo
| optimize for, but with no regard for accuracy and quality.
| webspinner wrote:
| Right, A lot of times I'm searching for a filing. Or a site
| link. I do not ask questions when I'm doing so, that's
| ridiculous. I don't ask questions if I'm searching for a
| recipe, or something in my local area either. Actually, I
| very rarely do this.
| sagarm wrote:
| Like you, I thought typing questions into Google was wrong
| for a long time. The times have changed; this is how most
| people interact with Google, and it really does convey intent
| to the system better now that we have sufficiently powerful
| NLP.
| warner25 wrote:
| I absolutely agree that it handles natural language
| questions much better now than when I started using search
| engines in the late 1990s - in fact it's optimized for this
| task now, meeting demand where it's at - but a direct
| answer to a question is often not what I want. For example,
| I often want to find a page that I remember reading in the
| past, so that I can re-read or cite it. Or I want more
| reading material to get a deeper, more nuanced
| understanding of some topic; things that will provide more
| context around answers or lead me to generating new
| questions.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's okay if your goal is to get an answer to a
| straightforward question. If, however, your goal is to
| research a topic, or to find sources for something, or any
| other scenario where your aim is to read actual web pages,
| then you want web search, not AI answers. These are two
| different use cases.
| masa331 wrote:
| Kagi has better search and you can tweak it however you like.
| So the product you are wishing for exists.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >But "search" and "getting an answer to a question" are two
| different things, aren't they?
|
| First conceptualization of the "search" were web directories
| then AltaVista and Google drove the complexity down for the
| users by providing the actual system which crawls, index and
| ranks web information. Now cycle will repeat again and we
| will get Answer Machines aka chat bots which drive the UX
| complexity for users even more down.
|
| Why would I skim search results links and websites if the
| "AI" can do it for me. The only reason would be if you don't
| trust the "AI" and you want the actual links of websites so
| you can look for useful information by yourself but the
| majority of people want an instant answer/result to their
| search query hence Google's old school button "I'm feeling
| lucky".
| ClimaxGravely wrote:
| The few times I gave it a try it was dead wrong. The dream is
| nice but the execution is lacking.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Search for anything with Google that has high ad monetization
| potential. You will find that Google turns off the AI overview.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| "Be Socially destructively evil via diffusion of content"
| flakes wrote:
| Its hit or miss for me. This week I was googling how to use
| libarchive and the AI generated responses at the top of each
| query were either incorrect or hallucinations of methods that
| don't exist.
|
| I don't mind playing with AI to help scratch together some
| code, but I do that using better models. Whatever model google
| is using for search results is too crappy for me to consider
| trusting.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I totally agree, I really appreciate them. Half the time they
| give me the answer straight away.
|
| And when they're not helpful, it's no different from the first
| search result not being helpful and going to the second. Plus,
| they do a pretty good job of only showing them for the types of
| searches where they're appropriate.
|
| Are the right 100% of the time? Of course not. But snippets
| weren't right 100% of the time, and not infrequently clicking
| on the top search result will contain information that's wrong
| as well. Because the _Internet_ isn 't 100% right.
|
| The idea that a "wall of text from AI" is somehow bad doesn't
| make any sense to me. And it's not a "wall", it's basically
| paragraph-sized. Where the context is really helpful in
| determining whether the answer seems correct/reasonable.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They're strictly worse.
|
| They're just a summary, so any information is in the results
| or hallucinated.
|
| If the AI could accurately point to the correct information,
| they would just order the results as such, but instead it's
| just a paragraph of spaghetti on a wall to look cutting edge.
| moralestapia wrote:
| You're definitely a contrarian.
|
| Google search is awfully bad these days.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| They are also wrong just slightly too often. After the fifth
| time I was twenty minutes in to trying to use command line
| options that just don't exist before realizing that I was being
| led down the winding path by an ai hallucination that I mistook
| for a stack overflow quote, I broke and paid for Kagi. Which
| then immediately added an AI drek feature, fml.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I can search for an answer to a question and, instead of
| getting annoying ads and SEO-optimized uselessness, I actually
| get an answer.
|
| You get the average of the seo optimized answers
| christophilus wrote:
| Same with Brave search. The AI answer is often good enough for
| me to not need to go further. I'm with you, except I don't use
| Google.
| pishpash wrote:
| It's wrong enough and unsourced enough that it's more cognitive
| load to vet the result than not having it.
|
| Google is barely more useful because of this.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I just want to be able to turn the stupid overview off. That's
| all. One simple toggle.
|
| I don't get why a Google Workspaces account can have Gemini
| forcibly disabled across the entire enterprise yet still have
| these AI features seep in with no way to manage it at the
| enterprise level.
| masa331 wrote:
| Why don't you use Kagi? It has better search and you can
| customize a lot of things, even turning off their LLM
| ajkjk wrote:
| Google search had gotten so bad the AI overview is passable in
| comparison. They don't deserve credit for that! Search was
| better at getting useful information fifteen years ago than it
| does now. (And yes, the internet is way more full of garbage
| now--but they did that, they are responsible for that too!)
|
| ... unless you want anything like a perspective or an opinion
| on something, instead of a factual answer to a question, in
| which case it's totally useless.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Why do we think the AI is any better? Isn't it based on the
| same dataset as search? How can it be anything but strictly
| worse for any given query?
| ajkjk wrote:
| Er.. I used it and that's what I thought?
|
| Search goes out of its way to hide why I want and show me
| bullshit shopping ads and influencer videos. The overview
| at least tries to help. For now.
|
| But I will emphasize: it's still not that helpful, it's
| just less corrupted than the main body results are... so
| far.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Is Google supposed to give you an answer, or help you find
| something you're looking for?
|
| Back when they only tried to help you find something, they were
| good at that. Really good. Then the ads and meta-slop came in
| and you couldn't find things anymore.
|
| Then they decided they also wanted to answer questions, which
| is hard enough (they're often wrong). So they have to focus
| harder on answering questions.
|
| And since they're trying to do both in one page/place, the
| question-answering has taken center stage, and finding things
| is now next to impossible.
|
| So they're no longer a search engine. They're a crap version of
| OpenAI.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I dont find it useful for the things I search
|
| I still have to check the sources and then add "reddit" to the
| end of my search query
|
| so for me its actually an additional third step or remembering
| not to trust the ai overview
| whimsicalism wrote:
| if google's AI overview were as smart as 4o, i would like it a
| lot more.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| An answer is only as good as the expertise behind it. When
| searching I always pay attention to the source, and will skip
| ones that look less trustworthy.
|
| One major advantage of Google's original pagerank was that
| originally it worked well and number of links to a page was a
| good proxy for trustworthiness and authority on a subject. It
| used to be that you'd find what you were looking for in the top
| few Google search results, which was a massive improvement to
| Alta Vista which was the existing competition where you'd have
| to wade though pages of keyword match sites listed in no
| particular order.
|
| Anyway, source is critically important, and if I'm looking to
| find something authoritative then the output of an LLM, even if
| RAG based, is not what I'm looking for! Increasingly people may
| be looking to search to verify stuff suggested by an LLM, which
| makes a search engine that puts LLM output as it's top result
| rather unhelpful!
|
| It doesn't help that with Google in particular their AI output
| is all heavily DEI biased, and who knows what else ... I just
| don't trust it as objective.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I sometimes like it, but I've gotten very skeptical of it. One
| day a friend and I searched the exact same question in Google
| and got opposing answers for the identical search string. Thus
| wasn't in the "AI" widget, but one of their usual widgets that
| give answers to questions. I assume both use some form of AI
| anyway.
| griomnib wrote:
| I think when it's good it's pretty good.
|
| But knowing _when_ it is good is still hard, as I can't trust
| it more than an LLM. But with an LLM I have a simple chat
| window, not a bag of rabid SVPs fighting to be on the SERP
| page.
| verdverm wrote:
| I use google.com for search and Gemini for Q&A. Two sites for
| two modes. I also use uBlock to remove the ai response from my
| search results to keep them clean and separate
| antihero wrote:
| Arc Search is what Gemini dreams of being. I've found it to be
| incredibly useful tool to cut through a lot of the crap.
| onion2k wrote:
| Google's AI summary of search results hallucinates. You might
| like it, but you may also end up seeing, and believing in,
| something that just doesn't exist.
|
| For example, it says there's a sequel to a Disney film called
| Encanto, and there just isn't.
| https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3lee...
| m_ke wrote:
| SEO ruined the web, guided by Google's ranking algorithm.
|
| Things will get even worse as scammy companies start flooding the
| web with LLM generated content pushing their products to bias
| LLMs to increase the probability of outputing their name for
| keywords related to their business.
| wwweston wrote:
| Libraries and librarians are starting to seem very relevant
| again. As are journalistic institutions.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| What a relief then that those are all healthy, well-supported
| organizations with bright futures.
|
| It's not a coincidence that the solution to this problem is
| exactly the organizations that are being systematically
| undermined and dismantled.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They aren't being undermined and dismantled, they're dying
| of the same cancer search is, and one they contracted
| voluntarily: _advertising_.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Libraries are?
| rfrey wrote:
| My local library doesn't have ads posted all over the
| place, or anywhere for that matter.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Journalistic institutions have been requiring so much fact-
| checking, cross referencing and research lately it's a full
| time job to get informed.
|
| Whenever I read or hear anything from the medias now, I'm now
| always asking myself "what are their political inclinations?
| who is owning them ? what do they want me to believe? how
| much of a blind spot do they got ? how lazy or ignorant they
| are in that context ? etc."
|
| They killed the trust I had in them so many times I can't get
| any the benefit of the doubt anymore.
|
| It's exhausting.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What I was taught is this is just the labor of being
| critical, or just "having a critical mind about things." I
| can maybe see how it is exhausting, but I am not sure I
| understand the implication that it could be better or
| different. If it is particularly exhausting to you, it is
| perfectly fine to suspend your judgement about certain
| things!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| If running a marathon is not exhausting to you, I don't
| think expecting the rest of the world to feel fresh after
| it is the right way to see the world.
|
| Except given the noise/signal ratio and the sheer mass of
| information we have today, the workload is much higher
| than training for a 42 km run.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It could be better and different - trust. Being critical
| is not the same thing as not trusting anyone _at all_.
| Media has by and large become not worthy of trusting _at
| all_. There are exceptions, but they are few and far
| between.
|
| The economics of just giving the news with little bias
| just aren't there anymore.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That's not new, it's always been the case.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Newspapers and other media have always had a political
| slant. But the more respected media have maintained rough
| factual accuracy because it enhances their impact and so
| their political slant.
|
| What's happened is that the income of media outlets has
| declined to the point that most can't get factual
| accuracy even if they want it.
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| Your claim that media outlets are no longer factual
| because they can't afford paying to be factual seems
| specious. They often make egregious errors that take a 5
| minute Google to correct.
|
| Instead of facts being unaffordable, it seems that lies
| and bias simply pay more (or at least the media outlets
| seem to think so).
| ranger207 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. I think that media has always
| had some inevitable inaccuracy, but it's only been in the
| past 20-30 years that people have had enough information
| to see that inaccuracy. Back when there were a dozen
| newspapers on the newsstand and 3 TV channels, there
| simply wasn't anywhere to see any information outside the
| mainstream media. This wasn't necessarily malicious or
| intentional; it was simply a reflection of culture and
| the type of people who worked in newsrooms. With the
| invention of the Internet anyone could easily find
| alternative sources of information. Sometimes those
| sources were more accurate than the mainstream, sometimes
| less. Nowadays there isn't a "mainstream" of media
| because there's so many sources, and the group labelled
| as "the mainstream media" is simply a group with similar
| biases.
|
| Or to put it another way, the media's accuracy rate has
| stayed consistent at some value less than 100%, but if
| all three TV channels reported the same information then
| it looked like they had 100% accuracy. Once there were
| more sources of information then it became apparent that
| the media's accuracy was less than 100% despite their
| protests to the contrary.
|
| The result is that the media landscape is fractured. A
| person can live in a bubble where all of their news
| sources (eg NYT, WaPo, and Bluesky for one bubble; Fox,
| Newsmax, and Truth Social for another bubble) all report
| the same information, making their accuracy appear to be
| 100%, while any single source of information outside the
| bubble that disagrees with the bubble is disagreeing with
| a bunch of apparently 100% accurate sources and so can
| safely be discarded.
|
| The solution is to realize that no source is 100%
| accurate or unbiased even despite genuine efforts to be.
| That isn't to say that some sources aren't more accurate
| or unbiased than others, but you should apply some base
| level of skepticism to any and every source
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The signal/noise ratio is getting lower and lower.
|
| News is leaning more and more into entertainment.
|
| You did have all of this before, but 24h news channel
| with empty content are reaching new magnitude, fox news
| types of outlet are getting bolder and bolder,
| manufacturing facts is now automated and mass-produced,
| consequences for scandals are at an all time low,
| concentration of power at an all time high, etc.
|
| It was bad.
|
| It is getting worse.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I don't have a baseline (though can think of a few places
| I might look...)[1], but I do have some recent data based
| on a project I've been working on.
|
| There's a simplified page for CNN news at
| <https://lite.cnn.com>.
|
| I've found that frustrating as all the stories are
| jumbled together with little rhyme or reason (though they
| seem to be roughly date-ordered).
|
| Ironically, the story URLs themselves include _both_ date
| _and_ news-section coding, as with:
| https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/28/us/patrick-thomas-egan-
| accused-tv-reporter-attack/index.html
|
| That's a US story dated 2024-12-28.
|
| It's possible to extract these and write a restructured
| page grouped by subject, which I've recently done. One
| work product is an archive of downloaded front-page
| views, which I've collected over about the past 5 days.
| Extracting unique news URLs from that and counting by
| classification we get a sense of what CNN considers
| "news": Stories: 486 Sections: 27
| 76 (15.64%) US News 67 (13.79%) US Politics
| 9 (1.85%) World 8 (1.65%) World -- Americas
| 6 (1.23%) World -- Africa 15 (3.09%) World --
| Asia 4 (0.82%) World -- Australia 5
| (1.03%) World -- China 2 (0.41%) World --
| India 37 (7.61%) World -- Europe 21
| (4.32%) World -- MidEast 2 (0.41%) World --
| UK 8 (1.65%) Economy 45 (9.26%)
| Business 4 (0.82%) Tech 3 (0.62%)
| Investing 8 (1.65%) Media 8 (1.65%)
| Science 7 (1.44%) Weather 4 (0.82%)
| Climate 22 (4.53%) Health 2 (0.41%)
| Food 1 (0.21%) Homes 39 (8.02%)
| Entertainment 52 (10.70%) Sport 22
| (4.53%) Travel 9 (1.85%) Style
|
| The ordering here is how I display sections within the
| rendered page, by my own assigned significance.
|
| One element which had inspired this was that so much of
| CNN's "news" seemed entertainment-related. That's not
| just "Entertainment", but also much of Health, Food,
| Homes, Sport, Travel, and Style, which are collectively
| 147 of 486 stories, or about 1/3 of the total.
|
| Further, much if not _most_ of the "US-News" category is
| ... relatively mundane crime coverage. It's attention-
| grabbing, but not particularly _significant_. Stories in
| other sections (politics, business, investing, media) can
| also be markedly trivial.
|
| Ballparking half of US news as non-trivial crime, at best
| about 60% of the headlines are what I'd consider to be
| actual journalistic news, and probably less than that.
|
| On the one hand, I now have a tool which gives me a far
| more organised view of CNN headlines. On the other ...
| the actual content isn't especially significant.
|
| I'm looking at similar tools for other news sites, though
| I'm limited to those which will serve JS-free content.
| Many sites have exceedingly complex page layouts, and
| some (e.g., the _Financial Times_ don 't encode date or
| section clearly in the story URLs themselves, e.g.:
| https://www.ft.com/content/d85f3f2d-9e9d-4d92-a851-64480e
| 56a248
|
| That's a presently current story "Putin apologises to
| Azerbaijan for Kazakhstan air crash", classified as
| "Aviation accidents and safety".
|
| -------------------------------
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. For those interested, most readily accessed and
| parsed, the Vanderbilt TV News Archive
| (<https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/>), which has rundowns of
| US natinoal news beginning 5 August 1968, to present
| (ABC, CBS, and NBC from inception, with CNN since 1995
| and Fox News since 2004). It's not the most _rigorous_
| archive, but it 's one that could probably be analysed
| more reasonably than others.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Unfortunately, many of the "journalistic" institutions are
| owned by large corporations who aren't going to "speak truth
| to power" in fear of retribution.
|
| We just saw this with ABC News's settlement with Trump
| because its owner Disney wanted to stay in his good graces.
|
| We also saw this with Bezos owner Washington Post
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Let's be honest: the major journalistic outlets only "speak
| truth to power" when it means they get to criticize their
| outgroup. Which means any time Republicans have power,
| they're falling over themselves to speak up. But when
| Democrats have power, they are conspicuously silent. Time
| and time again this happens, and they have completely
| undermined their own credibility by doing so.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| You forgot LA Times oligarch, Patrick Soon-Shiong.
| debesyla wrote:
| A library is similar to search engine - it can't have
| (display) all possible items (results), so there is also a
| bias for selection.
|
| It's not easy for a truly creative, new and unique content to
| get into your local library.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Libraries are booming but as gathering spots and place for
| people to get wifi to ... consume the web. Books remain but
| the selection is quite sparse.
|
| And journalism has been gutted, more gutted than is obvious.
| Especially, with mainstream journalists having few "feet on
| the ground" a lot can sneak by (what happened in East
| Palestine, for example, can be found on Youtube's Status Coup
| new but not the mainstream).
| eastbound wrote:
| This. If Google kept at "Pages must be short and provide
| straight answers", then we'd have much better search results
| today.
|
| Google is machine-gunning its foot since 2021, it's really
| unclear to me whether they're killing their baby just to make
| the job harder for competitors or something. For now... I open
| the Google Search results with a machete, and often don't find
| any answer.
|
| Talk about severing your own foot to avoid gangrene.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Why ascribe to malice, what can be explained by ineptitude?
|
| I just don't think Google cares enough about the web as a
| whole to make strategic decisions for content quality in
| aggregate.
|
| Sure it cares about geeky nuances and standards (e.g. page
| structure / load times), but Pichai isn't considering the
| impact on web content quality when debating an algorithm
| change or feature.
|
| If Google continues driving web quality off the cliff? Well,
| the business KPIs stayed green.
| n144q wrote:
| > I just don't think Google cares enough about the web as a
| whole to make strategic decisions for content quality in
| aggregate.
|
| The only thing they care about is ad revenue. Google
| created Chrome which vastly improved browser user
| experience. Google is a major participant in web standard &
| JavaScript language evolution, among other work. That's all
| true, but not necessarily because they "care about the
| web", but rather it helps their ad business. If people put
| the entire world's information on websites, and people
| spend more time in browsers, Google ends up earning more
| money from ads.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > If Google kept at "Pages must be short and provide straight
| answers", then we'd have much better search results today.
|
| I disagree. Any prescription for what the ranking should be
| that isn't simply the most relevant result is a worse
| ranking.
|
| I don't care if the top search result is the fastest,
| leanest, shortest, straightest, most adless, most equitable
| answer to my query if it's not the best answer to my query.
| I'll take the slowest loading, most verbose, popup ridden,
| mobile-unfriendly site if it's the one that has what I asked
| for.
|
| Trying to add weights for things other than relevance is
| probably exactly where Google started going wrong. And then
| when it turned out badly, people propose yet more weights
| beyond relevance to fix the problem of irrelevance?
| mrkramer wrote:
| It's fascinating to me that Google didn't yet crack the
| actual discovery of websites and information. Google is
| constrained to 10 search results by design because majority
| of people won't ever go to the second search results page. So
| basically they have to figure out how to put as much useful
| information and links on the first page of search results.
| Btw I think we need web directories now more than ever.
| techdmn wrote:
| I would argue that advertising ruined the web. SEO for sites
| selling real products only goes so far. People are often
| searching for information, and monetizing that activity through
| advertising is what caused the disaster of low quality content
| flooding the web today. I'm not saying things would be perfect
| without advertising, just much better than they are now.
| pembrook wrote:
| Advertising ruined the UX of Google's search page, but I
| would argue the exact opposite when it comes to the web
| itself.
|
| The real thing that ruined the open web and viability of
| search was, ironically, when Google killed display
| advertising by cutting Adsense payouts to near zero.
|
| Now publishers monetize via the much more sinister
| "affiliate" marketing. You know, when you search for "Best
| [X]" and get assaulted with 1,000 listicles packed with
| affiliate links for junk the author has never even seen in
| person.
|
| At least in the old system, you knew that an ad was an ad!
| Now the content itself is corrupted to the core.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| chatGPT offers bullshit answers faster, and more confidently.
| However the issue for openAI is the cost of business is
| _horrifically_ expensive.
|
| Sure they charge some users for premium access, but they aren't
| currently enough to cover costs.
|
| openAI needs a step change in performance, and that meta doesn't
| release an open-source version of it _and_ a step change in
| compute efficiency.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is it faster? I just did similar queries to the ones in the
| article and ChatGPT (web) spent a long time with an animated
| "Searching the web" placeholder, then served an error.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| for searching the web, probably not. For the "whats the
| difference between tiffin and rocky road" its probably much
| quicker.
|
| However if you want to get _more_ information, or assess if
| thats bollocks or not, its much slower and click-ier
| eastbound wrote:
| So, as a company, when can I pay OpenAI to twist its responses
| towards my company?
|
| Because it will happen. I'm afraid that ChatGPT is my friend for
| 20EUR today, but prices will increase and response quality will
| go the way of Siri.
| h_tbob wrote:
| I for one love the "wall of ai" this author decries. It is super
| helpful for most of the questions I ask. I don't know why he
| doesn't like it.
| zknowledge wrote:
| Definitely agree, but I'm surprised Perplexity wasn't mentioned
| in this post. It's currently Perplexity Vs. Google
| Deegy wrote:
| Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search
| functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not
| unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall
| for Perplexity.
| weberer wrote:
| Could you explain more? Are the results better, or are there
| other features?
| neonbrain wrote:
| I assume he's just being over dramatic. I use Perplexity
| every day, multiple times per day, and it almost completely
| replaced Google for me in such areas as coding or
| technological research. Also, I never used nor planning to
| use ChatGPT or Claude (I use private open models instead -
| Mistral Nemo, Qwen, etc.). But I also feel like "I'm not
| unique in this regard", lol.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I
| only really use it because it can read the results to me
| which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's
| that.
| animanoir wrote:
| Still using Google I see? How primitive..
| hammock wrote:
| What do you use?
| msoad wrote:
| I remember when the more tech savvy folks were migrating from
| Altavista and Yahoo to Google because they understood it is
| better sooner than others. The same thing is happening. I
| consider myself tech savvy (still!) and I have to admit that I
| rarely use Google for all sort of information.
|
| As a side note: I am using Safari and I noticed that Apple's
| search is also replacing my Google searches. In the past if I
| knew name of a company or organization but not their website I'd
| Google it. Now I put it in the address bar and Safari very often
| finds the website for me.
| wwweston wrote:
| Of course the savvy are using LLMs now, but they're also
| reckoning with two things:
|
| * you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites
| something (because it may or may not exist)
|
| * you can't cite an LLM result
|
| It's a useful tool, but it lacks certain utility features that
| a useful web + effective search has. Or had.
| maximus_01 wrote:
| 100%. But gradually being solved as source links are being
| provided. If the source link is as good as what you'd find on
| Google anyway then you have a way better search experience
| and don't really burn much extra time checking the LLM work
| weberer wrote:
| Even without using LLMs, Duckduckgo is good at providing
| little widgets that just give you a straight answer. Try
| searching "150 usd to eur" or "Weather Philadelphia".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Of course the savvy are using LLMs now
|
| I don't think this is true at all. It is people prone to
| hype, or who are naive, who are using LLMs. The savvy know
| that a tool which you have to verify every single time
| (because it isn't deterministic and makes shit up) isn't
| actually saving you any effort.
| wwweston wrote:
| The point that there's effort involved in verification is
| an important one and definitely part of any thorough
| inventory of liabilities and advantages of LLMs.
|
| I am less convinced this means it's always a wash (or
| worse). Sometimes it's good to have something to start
| with. "You can't edit a blank page" is a truism among
| fiction and non-fiction writers of all stripes for a
| reason. Of course, the quality of what you start with
| matters, and it matters more the less of an evaluatory
| mindset you come to your tools with. I know at least some
| earlier adopters have that mindset, but perhaps I'm too
| optimistic about how it generalizes.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > * you have to check an LLM result, especially if it cites
| something (because it may or may not exist)
|
| You think that you _don 't_ have the check the link at the
| top of the page from a google search?
|
| In fact, last I checked, for every google search I do, I have
| literally hit the page down key before starting to read.
|
| > * you can't cite an LLM result
|
| And you think you can cite the top search result from a
| google search?
| NegativeK wrote:
| > And you think you can cite the top search result from a
| google search?
|
| I think the issue with LLM answers is that I often have to
| go to Google or something to check if the answer is right.
| Maybe it shaves some time off, but we're still back to the
| original problem.
| kijiki wrote:
| Apple's search is Google search. Google pays Apple $20 billion
| a year for that.
| maximus_01 wrote:
| He means the top part above Google suggestions. If you type a
| url or company name Apple sometimes guesses the url and
| provides a direct link. Google not involved there - only if
| you click a Google suggestion or hit search/enter or whatever
| pluc wrote:
| AI is just doing what SEO people have been doing for decades,
| inflating results that have no business being there. At least now
| there's no pretention of having any skills.
| pixelsort wrote:
| Of course OpenAI can't stuff their UI with ads yet. In the middle
| of escalating anti-AI sentiment due to the rapid slopification of
| the infosphere that they intiated? With cultural resentment
| growing over the devaluation of visual evidence? With video and
| audio modalities creating distrust and obsolescence in the
| creative class?
|
| Google only had to provide superior value with a clean UI. OpenAI
| has to contend with normalizing the mechanisms that are upsetting
| the lives of the customer base that pays them; the customers
| they'll replace with ad servers as soon as it becomes prudent to
| start indicating their end-game.
| bfrog wrote:
| Google in 2000s was excellent. Modern Google makes me feel like
| I'm a product being sold a lemon at a barb wire fenced used car
| lot. It's horrible, the things being shown are horrible, and
| there's questionable ethics and value to be had by even going
| there.
| potsandpans wrote:
| Just sharing an anecdote:
|
| I was searching for a quote that I'd heard in an audiobook the
| other day. I just had the general paraphrase, and didn't feel
| like scanning through the chapters to go find it. This was a
| somewhat obscure source.
|
| Google had just straight garbage for me. The quote was political
| in nature, and I felt like the results were fighting general
| tone-policing filters and were tuned for recent events.
|
| o1 on the other hand, found the author of the quote, summarized
| the general idea of what i might be searching for and then cited
| potential sources.
|
| It's just patently obvious to me that google has failed in
| delivering the core value prop of their product, they're begging
| to be replaced.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I couldn't remember the phrase "oral history" and Google was
| terrible at figuring out what I wanted to search for, but
| ChatGpt got it for me after a few back and forths.
| morkalork wrote:
| That's where I'm at too, I wanted to find the origin a quote
| and couldn't remember the exact words. Google was just pulling
| up random shit related to the words in the query and nothing
| related to the quote itself. ChatGPT figured it out in a
| minute. Same goes for looking stuff up in books, just ask what
| chapter something happens in.
| geertj wrote:
| Piling on, but I wanted to find a song I had once heard when I
| was a kid. I did not know the exact lyrics, just that it was
| woman talking about her husband leaving for space. I had tried
| to find the song using regular search engines multiple times
| over the years. Eerily (a little over a year ago, using
| GPT3.5), I was able to find the song within about 15 minutes of
| prompting with various pieces of information including tone,
| topic, and rough year I heard the song. (The song was "Clouds
| across the moon" from the Rah band.)
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I had a similar experience last week. Searched and searched for
| a blurb from Middlemarch, without luck. o1 returned exactly
| what I was hoping for in one fell swoop.
| Lewton wrote:
| A week ago, I was looking for the name of a semi obscure late
| 90ies computer game. Google could not help me given the
| description i gave
|
| Described it to ChatGPT, and we had a back and forth where I
| explained why the games it suggested me weren't right, it
| eventually found the correct game (Nocturne) and was able to
| explain to me that half of the things I remembered from the
| game were just plain wrong, and that's why Google couldn't find
| it
|
| ChatGPT helping me with my hallucinations, go figure
| pembrook wrote:
| There's so much low effort, low hanging fruit that Google could
| do to improve results, that I just assume those things are all
| actually unprofitable.
|
| I mean just de-ranking any article with an affiliate link alone
| would skyrocket the relevance of what content you surface on
| search.
|
| The problem for Google is, they're incentivized to make the
| results worse than their search page ads. If the organic
| results are too good, nobody would ever click the ads. And they
| basically killed off Adsense to go all on on SERP ads, so they
| no longer monetize off third party sites.
| bambax wrote:
| > _Does ChatGPT Search have trust? Open AI isn 't monetizing its
| search just yet, but AI has its own issues with hallucinations._
|
| Everywhere where SEO people congregate, they talk only about
| this: how to produce content that will eventually end up in
| training data for LLMs, so that when you ask about anything
| remotely connected to a given brand, its products will show up in
| the response.
|
| Ads are bad enough today, but it's possible the future will be
| worse: product placement in everything, everywhere, all of the
| time.
| falcor84 wrote:
| This reminds me of that awesome analysis of all the speech of a
| diplomat's visit in Asimov's original Foundation book:
|
| > Hardin threw himself back in the chair. "You know, that's the
| most interesting part of the whole business. I admit that I
| thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met
| him - but it turned out that he is an accomplished diplomat and
| a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his
| statements."
|
| >... When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in
| eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless
| qualifications--in short all the goo and dribble--he found he
| had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin,
| gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned
| thing, and said it so that you never noticed.
|
| I'm pretty sure that we're now at the level of AI where it's
| possibly to fully automate such an analysis, such that even if
| the original content is entirely corrupted by product
| placement, the AI could cut it out to leave only the valuable
| information, if any remains. The only question is whether the
| AI will be on the user's side or the advertiser's side.
| bambax wrote:
| What will happen is that when you ask the AI to summarize a
| book to remove the fluff, it will inject random mentions of
| how the main character decided to drink a Coke.
|
| Let's go with truly open models! you say. That way we can be
| sure there are no shoddy behind-the-scenes deal going on
| between the model provider and some company or government.
|
| But the ads are _in the training data_ , they are part of the
| fabric of the world. You can't get rid of them except if you
| do the training yourself, which is a huge amount of work, and
| maybe impossible (because model providers escape copyright
| laws, and you can't).
| falcor84 wrote:
| I agree about the difficulty, but am optimistic that if
| enough of us wanted to achieve this, we could train it as a
| distributed effort, with the coordination of a non-profit
| like the EFF. The question is whether we care enough.
| shinycode wrote:
| I agree we need something radically different because it's an
| open gate to partial product placement with ads generated on
| the fly to people taste. Awful future ahead
| randall wrote:
| i'll buy this. seems reasonable.
| thrance wrote:
| There is no cure to the endless stream of AI generated SEO-trash.
| As long as there is a system to game and an incentive to do so,
| it will be gamed.
|
| The only solution I can dream of is to remove the incentive, aka
| remove advertising. I'm afraid I'll be dead long before that.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In 2000s we were freeloading on the investors expense, in 2020's
| investors are recouping their investments.
|
| Also, most of the content was either stolen(divx, mp3 etc) or
| created without of expectation of immediate reward(mostly passion
| projects).
|
| Oh and btw, Google didn't got infested after LLMs proliferation.
| Google results were useless way before that. With LLMs there's
| even improvement as the spam is at least mediocre content.
| epanchin wrote:
| I'm happy to pay for ChatGPT, and I would happily pay for a clean
| Google search experience without ads. How much are they making
| per visitor a month?
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Have you looked into Kagi? I'm very happy with it.
| effdee wrote:
| So... the next step clearly is ChatGPT adding Ads to its output.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Once timeless facts will be solidified in AI training, like
| historical dates, laws of physics, maths formulas or specific
| programming API, there will be no reason to search for these
| things using Google.
|
| The web battle will then happen on this moving quickly, like the
| news.
|
| This will give immensely more power to the medias, and I fear
| that a lot given they have demonstrated time and again they can't
| be trusted with it.
| firebaze wrote:
| They lost way too much trust across the board the last years,
| culminating in the Biden/Harris/Trump debacle.
|
| Youtube/Instagram Reels/Tiktok is the (sad) future. "Classical"
| media is a zombie.
|
| Google is deader than dead on the search front. But I think
| they'll go the IBM route, albeit more successful
| AJRF wrote:
| The example he shows here has the answer to his question
| highlighted in the AI overview, and in huge text in the InfoBox.
| He got his answer instantly without having to go to another page.
|
| Really wish such bold claims had better evidence.
| gundmc wrote:
| Agreed, I actually prefer the Google page in the example
| screenshots. And in my experience Google still returns much
| much faster than GPT Search.
|
| I'm open to the suggestion that OpenAI can disrupt Google, but
| this was a weird case to highlight.
| k__ wrote:
| Brave Search might be a good alternative.
|
| It's index is created by people surfing with the Brave browser,
| so only websites used by real people are included.
| nottorp wrote:
| Why OpenAI in particular?
|
| I mean, Gemini is much better than the "traditional" google
| search as well.
|
| Anything is better than 2024 google search actually.
| dagmx wrote:
| A lot of folks are focusing on the AI answers that Google gives,
| but for me the real downgrade has been the change in their
| algorithm a few years ago where it tries to search for what it
| thinks I mean instead of what I search for.
|
| Even putting entire chunks of text in quotes isn't enough
| anymore. I can never get Google to search for what I want without
| trying to engineer a prompt, when it could at some point.
|
| In trying to become more helpful, it's become worse.
| cma wrote:
| Especially for programming identifiers. You put in some really
| tech sounding camel case identifier and it tries to split it
| out and match straight to celebrity trash scraped from Taboola.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s
|
| Google started going bad in the 2000s (albeit not as bad as now).
|
| > if it can remain trustworthy.
|
| At no point was it trustworthy - even if it were an abstract LLM,
| trust would be an issue; but this is the opaque product of a
| corporation heavily invested in by untrustworthy entities and
| people.
|
| That does not mean it isn't often useful, but "trust" and
| "usefulness" are two very different things.
| karaterobot wrote:
| What is the current status of SEO weasels trying to poison AI
| data by stuffing it with spam?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Will OpenAI eventually deliver ads along with responses?
|
| "Before getting a response, a word from our sponsors:" type
| thing?
| georgeplusplus wrote:
| I think I've had such a bad experience with openAIs charGPT
| answering a question falsely and sounding very convincing that I
| skip the AI overview or double check to confirm it's correct. Am
| I mad?
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| In my experience that's not limited to chatGPT, all of the LLM
| tools seem worthless to me.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| I already regularly am helping someone with something, they'll
| Google it at the same time as me and they'll authoritatively
| regurgitate the AI summary. More often than not, it's been
| misleading, or a partial answer to the point of being
| detrimental.
|
| I get it though. I sort of am the news guy of my family and
| they constantly ask me where I go for news. It's an impossible
| answer. I grew up with the internet in it's early days, using
| it for policy debate research. It's a non-precise method of
| consuming various sources, judging their answers on
| plausibility and commonalities, and a healthy dose of constant
| skepticism.
|
| But people don't want that. They want the answer spoodfed to
| them.
| jagtstronaut wrote:
| This. I think Amazon is doing the same thing and leaving the door
| open for Walmart or another player with some logistical muscle to
| take a bunch of the market from them. Amazon search used to be so
| simple. Now you sift through so many ads and hidden ad garbage to
| find the thing you want to buy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick answer
|
| Nailed it. Google should show the transcript.
| plagiarist wrote:
| This is correct. A ton of the hype about LLMs is you can type in
| a question and get a direct answer without needing to struggle
| through listicles. Phenomenal compared to the trash a search
| result provides.
|
| Is is ironic that LLMs are the source of much of the garbage in
| search results. Good business model to produce unbearable noise
| and the filter that recovers some signal, I guess.
| heironimus wrote:
| I was using ChatGPT to compare Docker and Podman and getting
| reasonable comparisons. I also asked it about c code searching
| tools and getting a reasonable list with what I think were
| reasonable comparisons.
|
| It hit me that in a few years, this may not be available as
| Docker and other tool suppliers start paying for advertising.
| We'll see.
| manbash wrote:
| I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT if
| it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or used
| as a reference in its answers.
|
| Unfortunately, it doesn't, and so I can't verify them. Not sure
| if it's an actual limitation of current LLM or rather they're
| intentionally filtering out the sources.
| jclulow wrote:
| If the system was willing to link to the sources from which it
| obtained particular information, it would be too easy to hold
| them accountable for having stolen a bunch of content from
| people who didn't opt in!
| pton_xd wrote:
| > I wouldn't be concerned about trusting the results of ChatGPT
| if it also were providing links to the sources it had cited or
| used as a reference in its answers.
|
| This will only be a problem for a few more years. Soon every
| article, paper, and website will be generated by a LLM.
| Verifying the output of ChatGPT by referencing other LLM
| generated source material will be a pointless exercise.
| Beijinger wrote:
| This! "I don't want to watch a 10-minute video for a quick
| answer."
|
| And this: "OpenAI's search is becoming Google in the 2000s, if it
| can remain trustworthy."
|
| The problem I see: People use OpenAI/Perplexity for knowledge.
| Not to seek website. I think sooner or later, most website will
| block AI crawlers. What does a website gets out of it?
| jayd16 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the AI service that turns those 10 minute
| videos into a text tutorial with photos.
|
| I think it's pretty damning that it's not a built in YouTube
| feature by now.
| Beijinger wrote:
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtubedigest-
| summa...
| award_ wrote:
| Lots of limitations here but they do offer an 'ask' button
| under some circumstances:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14110396?hl=en
|
| I've found it to be helpful in getting quicker information
| out of some 'review' style videos, where I can ask a few
| pointed questions and get answers faster than the narrator
| can get to that info. I hadn't found it to be wrong in my few
| attempts with it, but ymmv
| baxtr wrote:
| Today I had a better experience with Google than with ChatGPT.
|
| I started with chat and asked why I couldn't change the passcode
| on a kid's device.
|
| I tried 3 answers. None worked.
|
| So I google. First hit is an Apple forum with the exact problem.
| Solved.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I don't think it will be as easy to supplant google search as it
| was in the past with Yahoo and Alta Vista. In the past internet
| search was just starting we were all used to trying different
| search engine and the results were different enough with all the
| different ways of indexing and searching that moving from 1 to
| another made a difference. Most of the people using the internet
| were a bit of pioneers navigating through something brand new and
| unique.
|
| Today majority of the internet users ie 10-32 years old or 60%+
| of the internet users grew up with using Google and how to get
| best answers our of it. Chat gpt might bring in some churn but as
| long google is close enough it won't get replaced easily.
| jerf wrote:
| Don't bet on AI staying clean.
|
| A lot of HN readers conceptualize the forces attacking the
| integrity of the search results as just some isolated people
| taking occasional potshots, and then maybe slinking away if their
| trick gets blocked.
|
| It is probably a lot more accurate to visualize the SEO industry
| as a Dark Google. Roughly as well resourced, with many smart
| people working on it full time, day in, day out, with information
| sharing and coordination. It isn't literally one company, but
| this conception is probably a lot closer then the one in the
| heads of most people reading this. Dark Google is motivated,
| resourced, and smart.
|
| And then, once I started thinking of it that way for this post, I
| realized that increasingly.... Google is increasingly at beck and
| call of Dark Google. They're increasingly the real customers of
| Google and the real source of money. It's why Google just seems
| to be getting worse and worse for us... it's because we're not
| the real customers any more. Dark Google rules.
|
| And if Dark Google has not yet figured out how to scam AI... it
| is only a matter of time. Dark Google is where Google gets its
| money now. When Dark Google turns its attention to AI fully,
| OpenAI will be no more able to resist its economic incentives
| than Google did.
|
| Can't wait for the first screenshot of someone searching for the
| impact of the battle of Gettysburg on the civil war and seeing
| the AI do its subtle best to slide an add for Coca Cola into it
| in some semantically bizarre manner.
| _false wrote:
| I like the Dark Google metaphor, but SEO agencies being
| Google's real customers makes no sense to me.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yeah I also didn't get this. Can you explain what you meant?
| flpm wrote:
| I think it's more a symbiotic relationship, they feed on each
| other and both benefit at the expense of the users
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Maybe one step removed, if I understand it right, the spam
| sites make money by offering ad space and traffic, and Google
| makes money by selling ad placement on those sites, so
| actually Google and Dark Google are on the same side of the
| marketplace.
|
| In a way, it's the other way around, Google is paying the
| spammers for providing billboard space for their ad placement
| services.
|
| The pervese incentive is that the harder it is to find what
| I'm looking for, the more ads I get served, hence all ad
| supported products trend towards becoming useless (see also:
| Amazon.com)
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Not OP, but here's how I read it: the SEO operators are
| driving traffic to google's ad network, where google make's
| its money. They aren't necessarily paying google much: the ad
| buyers are doing that, but they deliver the eyeballs to
| google's ads.
|
| Its kind of like the US hospital system, where doctors are
| considered by the hospital, if not de jure then certainly de
| facto, to be the real customers of the hospital. Doctors
| don't pay the hospital much of anything -- the patients do,
| usually via their insurance company -- but without the
| doctors, no procedures happen (i.e., no "traffic.") Hospitals
| can't bill for room and board, nursing services, therapy,
| etc., where the hospital makes its operating income without
| the doctors, and in markets where multiple hospitals exist,
| doctors drive the patients to the hospital(s) of the doctor's
| choice. Ergo, the doctor is the "real" customer of the
| hospital.
|
| The hospitals can and have adapted to get a bigger share of
| the revenue pie by hiring _their own doctors_ and buying up
| the clinics that drive a lot of customers to hospitals in the
| first place, just like Google has introduced products that
| are more vertically integrated, but the basic dynamic still
| exists where they are dependent on third parties to deliver
| customers.
| d0mine wrote:
| Hospitals are increasingly owned by insurance companies.
| The customers are not doctors but shareholders. That is why
| a cure is seen as a threat.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That doesn't make sense - a sick patient costs the
| shareholders money.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Setting aside the previous commenters "the cure is a
| threat" thing, there's _some_ precedent for this in the
| US healthcare system in the form of HMOs (particularly
| Kaiser Permanente.) Part of that is supposed to be
| vertical efficiency. Part is the idea that it is possible
| to avoid extremely expensive acute care services with
| proactive low-cost primary care.
| simonh wrote:
| Only if you treat the patient. Cures cost money to
| administer. Better to just deny cover in the first place.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| 1) I was making an analogy.
|
| 2) I took at look at the most recent CMS data[0] I could
| find (from 2022,) and out of the top ten owners of
| hospitals in the United States, zero are payers. I only
| recognize about half of the parties in the 11-20 part of
| the list, but of the ones I do recognize, _one_ is
| related to a payer. I can find no data to support your
| assertion that insurance companies are purchasing
| hospitals. They are purchasing physician practice groups,
| but that only reinforces the dynamic I described where
| hospitals have to court physicians to drive patients to
| their facilities.
|
| 0 - https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/58
| 2de65f2...
| pegasus wrote:
| But Google would do just as well (probably better) without
| the SEOs, no? The SEOs are just manipulating the order of
| search results to their own interests, but I don't see how
| this would benefit Google's bottom line.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| SEO pages tend to be infested with ads (which google
| makes money on,) whereas legitimate businesses much less
| so. Imagine this scenario: you run a B&B on a popular
| tourist island and take reservations over the web. You
| pay google to run an ad relevant to your business. Some
| SEO turkey comes along and builds a ranked-up site that
| shows that ad, and has no other real reason to exist.
| Does google make more money or less money with the SEO
| operator in the equation? Would the original business
| have even bought a google ad if they could get organic
| traffic to their site without all the SEO spam?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > we're not the real customers any more.
|
| Were we ever? I didn't pay for search. I don't pay for email.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah it's hard to see how most HN user were the 'real
| customers' of Google at any point in time. It makes no sense
| to claim that.
| m463 wrote:
| Google isn't a search company, it is an identification company.
| that is its moat.
| NBJack wrote:
| I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period.
|
| Expect the SEO collective to shift focus on AI if the search
| approach becomes profitable in a few years.
|
| That said, given an "AI search" is estimated to be at least ten
| times [0] as expensive per query than traditional search, I
| hope you like ads.
|
| For those hoping to see that cost to go down, training costs
| for improved models have instead been going _up_. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-
| googles-a...
|
| [1] https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-
| intelligence-2/2024/openai...
| captainbland wrote:
| > I very much agree this is effectivity a 'honeymoon' period.
|
| At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which
| "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period
| which it later turned away from. This should really be the
| default, expected behaviour at this point.
| sofixa wrote:
| > At this point I'd be much more interested to hear which
| "unicorn" tech company did not have such a honeymoon period
| which it later turned away from
|
| Doctolib in France (and Italy, Germany, Netherlands) is one
| such example. Founded in 2013 so decent life, still as good
| as in the beginning for both consumers (people booking
| healthcare appointments) and the customers (doctors paying
| to use it for their appointment management). And they're
| only getting better, with e.g. an AI assistant in beta to
| take notes during appointments.
| sethev wrote:
| I think you're right, but also this doesn't contradict the
| article. Google reset to a cleaner state (leaving behind the
| advertising choked portals of the late 90s). Over time both
| internal and external forces have chipped aways at Google's
| original model.
|
| Perhaps AI could drive a similar reset.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| "dark Google" seems like the title of a blog post I would find
| on HN! This is intended as a compliment, in case not clear...
| Add some important facts and figures (what is the revenue of
| dark Google, who and how many are they employing) and write it
| up!
| mettamage wrote:
| Fun take
|
| Disconcerting take
|
| I like the narrative aspect of it
| bambax wrote:
| "Dark Google" is dark as in bad, but not as in obfuscated. They
| can be seen and observed in places like LinkedIn where they
| discuss their plans in the open.
|
| But I don't think Google is part of them, or their slave. I
| think Google is our last line of defense.
|
| True, it's not very effective; more like the knight in Monty
| Python's Sacred Grail. Still, when we lose Google, we'll have
| nothing else.
| rlpb wrote:
| Infestation also applies to actual "organic" results. The old
| Google philosophy would have ranked pages with annoying pop-ups,
| paywalls, sign-in walls etc out of existence. Today's Google does
| not. They even tolerate sites that show them articles to index
| but are then hidden from the general public behind a paywall.
|
| The old Internet still exists, but Google's ranking behaviour
| hides it.
| webspinner wrote:
| Google has put it's early 2000s history where it can't find it!
| In the garbage most likely, but somewhere deeper.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| This article woefully assumes OpenAI has had the same R&D that
| Google has had as a _search_ business.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Trying to replace Google w/GPT but....
|
| - Local search results for businesses, phone #s, directions isnt
| available
|
| - Im paying GPT subscriber and it constantly logs me out on my
| different devices
|
| - Sora I can not upload photos of whoever & make them do whatever
| like https://hailuoai.video/ which is free and at times fairly
| convincing (fun for the 12 yr old in you lol).
|
| I know GPT Search is new and Im excited for GPT to become a phone
| AI OS or Open AI & MIcrosoft developed their own phone with a new
| personal device paradigm... i.e. create a H.E.R. phone.. it's
| your personal AI Assistant that does all for you via text, voice,
| hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. Once you pick up your
| phone you see your assistant waiting to assist. You can skin your
| AI assistant to look like anyone living or dead (loved one could
| live on & help your throughout ur day). Probably some crazy ideas
| but a H.E.R. phone / personal device as described (some parts)
| would be something new/different and possibly give Apple and
| Android a run for their money!
| summerlight wrote:
| Google seriously needs to scale up their generative models to all
| of crawling/indexing/ranking infrastructure. Their current
| ranking models are not capable of dealing with the next-gen web
| filled with 99% gen AI craps. I think they also know this. The
| problem is the cost and they're hyper-focused on bringing it
| down, but it is not fast enough.
| anonnon wrote:
| > When Google came onto the scene, I credit its success to the
| tried and true paradigm that makes companies successful: simple
| and easy to use.
|
| > Yahoo was dominant back then, and it tried to put everyone and
| everything in front of you. Then we learned about the paralysis
| of choice. Too many choices, the mental fatigue weighed in, and
| the product became difficult to use.
|
| This nonsense again? I was around then, and I switched from Yahoo
| and AltaVista to Google despite its dumb name and stupid,
| childish logo because _Google 's results were hands-down better_.
| Instead of a solely full-text search paradigm based only on
| keyword density, Google also ranked pages based on how many other
| pages linked to them, the so-called "PageRank" algorithm.
|
| This worked much, much better, and was much harder (for a while)
| to game. Before Google, it was common when searching to find
| pages that gamed the search engines by stuffing their <meta>
| keyword tags with SEO crap or putting it in giant footer sections
| in a tiny font the same color as the background (to render it
| invisible). Google's PageRank wasn't fooled by this.
|
| Also most of the major search engines adopted similarly
| minimalist UIs, and it did _zero_ to stop the bleeding. They
| _all_ lost to google. (AltaVista, the pre-Google Google, was
| still useful for a while for some specialty searching, like for
| anonymous FTP servers, and I wonder if DEC had never gone under
| or if Compaq had spun off AltaVista, maybe history would be
| different.)
|
| EDIT: I just realized the article _doesn 't even mention
| AltaVista_. Unbelievable.
| lakomen wrote:
| yeah Google Search is awful and there's still nothing better.
| What's new?
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