[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to Use "Deep Research"?
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       Ask HN: How to Use "Deep Research"?
        
       The issue I have had with llms since the start has been the slop.
       Contrary to popular belief, the open web was mostly slop before
       ChatGPT. We just used to call it SEO blogspam. And all llms are
       trained on them.  So when I tried google's Deep Research in Gemini,
       I ran into the same problem. It was basically a typical llm chat
       response, but a lot more verbose and citations to the same blogspam
       listicles that makes regular human research difficult.  How do I
       avoid this pitfall? So what I am asking is, how do I use deep
       research?
        
       Author : muddi900
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2025-04-06 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
       | solardev wrote:
       | What topic or field are you researching? Is it something
       | academic, programming related, or...?
       | 
       | It generally helps if you ask it to focus on specific kinds
       | sources (gov sites, academic, etc.) but it really depends on the
       | topic. Easy for some topics (the general sciences) but not so
       | easy for other ones (popular culture stuff or current events).
        
       | addaon wrote:
       | Use it for what? If your goal is understanding... probably don't.
       | If you're trying to produce a document for an audience that
       | doesn't really care and will just use an LLM to summarize it
       | without any fact checking, then give the minimal prompting to get
       | the token count you need. This is where LLMs excel --- sequences
       | of tokens that are plausible use of human languages where the
       | cost for verifying if they have semantic value exceeds five or
       | ten minutes.
        
       | GianFabien wrote:
       | My naive, yet practical, view is that all LLMs produce output
       | that reflects what was most commonly found on the internet. So if
       | your area of interest has a lot of slop, then that is exactly
       | what _Deep Research_ will return.
       | 
       | So if you want to do "real deep research" into some topic, then
       | you start with the various summaries and drill down. I use Google
       | Scholar to locate papers, then I search for the cited papers. It
       | is tedious, but the only way that I know which avoids the
       | pitfalls of random regurgitation of easily found materials.
       | 
       | Currently AGI is marketing hype. Critical thinking with real
       | understanding, i.e. knowledge building hasn't yet been automated.
       | You need to put in the intellectual effort.
        
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