Sorry to break it to you folks but if you hated your data being with Google, you are in for a surprise on how atrociously bad Microsoft is at privacy and security. Multiple close friends who have worked at Microsoft tell me that search history data - who is searching what, is basically sitting in systems with ACLs so bad that 20-30K employees have access through transitive membership of groups. To access a customer's data you just need to know token which is logged everywhere and is apparently very easy to generate. I have heard horror stories from them about privacy incidents which never went public.
From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.
I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if this is the case, but I do not expect it to be as lax as you suggest and given how it's presented to us it reads like someone trying to get people to not look at something. If you have things you can present as evidence that would carry water for your argument, otherwise it's random inflammatory claim on in the internet.
And I agree, Google does take security more seriously than most places.
Oh yeah IIRC I used to look at Bing search logs in Microsoft and I wasn't on Bing team. This was 2014. Things probably have changed.
IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.
I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!
I hate Big Data(tm) as the next guy in line, but if I have to choose between Google and Microsoft nomming my data I'll happily pick Microsoft every time.
Why?
For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).
For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.
Dunno if it was incompetence or malice, but the straw that finally broke me over to Linux permanently was a privacy setting in Windows that appeared to work until you re-entered the menu and it wouldn't persist. In my time at YouTube though, privacy issues were an immediately fireable offense, and even when my role required data, use was gated and then still logged, and misuse was handled. That's an n=1 apples-to-oranges data point, but I personally trust Google a bit more than MS with my data.
I don’t hate Google for having my data because they have worse internal controls.
The monopolistic dominance is the issue. They have too much data and too much power, and leverage that to swallow other market categories. Today they have a deeply unhealthy dominance over the tech industry.
Google could do everything right and still be an existential problem. You say MS has data security issues, okay sure. I’d still rather have them or anyone at 25%+ of the market.
That anecdote reflects the data protection part, everyone dealing with Windows trying to disable tracking experienced their horrible data collection attitude
It's not much about Microsoft. At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...). What did Google bring to my life ? Nothing except for spam stuffs from Ad, Email,...
You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.
The article starts, "Nestled in the hills of Mountain View", which is worrisome, because as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Silicon Valley geography knows, Mountain View is mostly flat. And Google's Mountain View offices are located on reclaimed baylands, which are especially flat.
I wonder if the article authors were thinking of Xerox PARC's offices in Palo Alto's hills? Or the road named "Sand Hill Road" that used to have some venture capitalist offices? Other than those offices I can't think of any significant hill-based offices in Silicon Valley.
Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many.
It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product.
I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different business models (not only adv) and products.
The GOOG stock has a PE (Price/earning) of 23, while Coca cola 26. So the stock market expect higher growth from CocaCola than Google. Quite surprising.
It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model that has destroyed the internet (and much of tech with it) and this episode feels like just another turn of the downward spiral.
The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use.
It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.
People seem to forget: AI is about data, the ability to process it, and having a few smart folks to do algorithms. The third part is actually the smallest and easiest part of the trilogy for AI.
Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it.
Also SEO will always target the market leader.
As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing and I remember just how good Google is. That's my personal opinion. I am NOT going to claim they are SEO, and spam immune, far from. But they seem to do better than Bing in getting what I mean right.
ChatGPT may help MS, but is it a bandaid? Is it just a good PR bump? Who knows... Displacing Google is a large task.. and not one I'm sure I want MS to win. But I look forward to them trying, if only to make Google do better.
I don't understand this hype and I feel like I'm looking at different products than everyone else is. There are very few complaints I have about Google that I think this technology helps solve, and for most of my complaints, getting summaries of searches makes the situation worse, not better. To be completely clear: even if the AI was perfect, I don't know that I want even an actual human being to sit down and summarize an answer to my question rather than show me a list of search results.
The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.
But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from."
At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess?
Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me?
I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.
From my point of view the only usage of LLM is generation. Such as writing peer reviews, self reviews, OKRs, when I already know the truth and can edit out any errors. I will never trust a LLM's answer to something I don't already know.
There seem to be two different directions for innovation here.
The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. OpenAI currently offers an API that turns sentences into coordinates for a point in some 1536-dimensional conceptual space such that two points are close together if they are conceptually close together. This is insanely powerful. For example, you can generate captions for a bunch of images and store the embeddings for them. Then, you can look for a "picture of a rabbit eating a carrot" by turning that phrase into a 1536-dimensional point and looking for the nearest points around it. Basically, it blows open search technology for everyone. You no longer have to deal with synonyms, idiomatic phrases that mean similar things, misspellings etc - the problems you'd run into when trying to implement simple text search using traditional techniques. It all gets simplified to generating coordinates in some hyperspace and looking for nearest neighbors. This is a total game changer.
The second direction is ChatGPT. Sure, if you want to read a detailed analysis of the demographic situation in China, you'd prefer an article written by an expert. You would still use a search engine, pick a search result and do things the way you do them today. However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer. Today, you launch a browser, search for what you want, skip past the first 10 advertisements, look for a site that seems reasonably reputable, click through all the GDPR warnings, scroll past the banner ads and the SEO optimizing bullshit text to find that one sentence that you wanted all along. Or, you could ask ChatGPT and get an answer instantly. (assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually).
It's hard to predict which of these two technologies will disrupt the current status quo in search. Neither might. But we haven't ever been this close to a level playing field in search since the 1990s. The excitement is hard to resist.
I do not understand the appeal or gpt-powered searches.
Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.
Depends on your use case - if you are coding, or doing constraint analysis - 75+% of the time it's a single request, single answer, and you are done. The other element with ChatGPT is if you aren't happy with the initial answer for some reason - you can engage in a conversation with it, provide some guidance, and will adjust it to suit specifically what you are interested in. I've found about 50% of my google searches just go straight to ChatGPT these days. Hallucinations are the only real problem I've had - but over time you start to become cynical about the truth of anything factual - asking for unit tests helps quite a bit when coding - double checking any math is also important.
I do agree though, that without citations to the original source - any "Facts" that ChatGPT offers are absolutely untrustworthy.
As someone else said, I think a surprisingly (overwhelmingly?) large amount of queries are just questions people want answered, or close to them, and not really "search queries" in the traditional sense of text people are looking for on a page somewhere.
Even before this, you've seen the search engines add features to cater to that kind of use, things like Siri handing off questions it didn't understand to a search engine (as well as the other assistants that can do that), indications of this behavior in how companies like Google show themselves being used in ads.
Of course, regardless of the true prevalence of that behavior, it's probably in Google et al.'s favor to encourage that. Regular search sort of inherently cedes some power and control to the pages the results are coming from, where you're sending users away to if their answer isn't right in the snippet. But the "answer box" features, or an LLM that just tells you "the answer to your question" directly on the page keeps you there, treating the search page as your source of information and not somewhere else.
When you are curious about a fact, you're looking for a useful and accurate answer. You don't care what page you read it on, as long as it's both useful and accurate. You just think you are looking for a page because that's how you're used to doing it.
Beyond that, most of the results that rank for anything are plainly worse LLM blogspam padded for SEO. All you're doing here is cutting out the middleman.
The problem with chat gpt for factual question search is, of course, that it's not factual. It's job is to produce coherent sentences, not actually tell you factual information. So until they manage to get that right it's not a superior product.
There are two types of search, people looking for a specific resource (like searching for a song on youtube) and people just looking for an answer to a question. If a LLM can be factually accurate, its a superior search product for that specific use, which is probably the majority of search.
That said, ChatGPT does a very good job of understanding what I am looking for. If Microsoft could just insert this understanding into its regular search algorithms it would seem likely to significantly improve the quality of search results.
How could they have left such a massive gap in their product. They literally have the model and resources to revolutionize search. We all know LLMs will hurt their ad revenue, but regardless they have to have known this was coming. This is so similar to FB getting caught off guard by TikTok. There was a gap in the utility of their product (TikTok enabled grass roots content creation), and they just left it wide open.
Its some combination of:
1. ChatGPT is so much better than previous versions that Google themselves was stunned by the utility.
2. Incompetence/Gross negligence across Google
3. No way for them to reconcile the lost ad revenue, so they released nothing. This case is hard to argue for, as they would know theyre a sitting duck.
Regardless I am hoping for a massive Google failure. Theyre the ones responsible for the SEO content waste land that is the modern internet. We have all suffered at the feet of their ad machine
4. Google Search already has lots of useful AI already in it, but Google didn't want to integrate a racist, confabulating chatbot, forgetting that modern users have no preference for truth over lies.
Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?
Bing is my default on my work and home PC as I use edge, I've been too lazy to change it. For the most part, whenever I accidentally search something on Bing, I end up having to open up Google and search it again. Their results are still way better.
I think it’s interesting to consider why touchscreen mobile phones won out over their predecessors.
Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor.
Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of results you can vet yourself for content and source.
That said… I don’t think people care about truth that much these days so one response that feels correct is could be good enough for most. Terrifying times we live in folks.
Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one.
Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If Chat-GPT style models defeat traditional search engines it will be because the product is better, not because people are content with a response that "seems correct."
Agreed, the whole “this is the new search” has perplexed me. Primarily the idea that this AI is supposed to be the single point of truth. A traditional search allows the user to review a variety of contexts and viewpoints.
It’s highly concerning that this is something people seem to want (or at least, is being pushed onto them through marketing & hype), despite the huge outcry over algorithms and political agendas over the past few years…
Have the feeling that we are in a state of overreacting (news outlets love the headlines).
In addition, my gut feeling says that Google does things better than Microsoft.
This comes from my experience with working with Google and GCP products vs working with Microsoft Office/Windows and Azure.
With Google, everything feels consistent, well documented and well presented: from Meet/Gmail to BigQuery, Tensorflow, Cloud SQL, Firebase, etc.
With Microsoft I frequently observe inconsistencies in design patterns, broken links and outdated documentation. Just compare for example Office products, the concept of Office 365, Live Account vs Outlook account, Windows, Bing, Azure products, etc. Basically its hard to find any commonality and it feels that there is generally a lack of vision for the entire suit.
I therefore extrapolate that Google will answer this hype in a more structured way, anchored to a vision, putting it against a grand scheme of things and deliver it as a seemingly integrated solution to the suite.
Judging from the decreasing quality of Google Search I'd say they've been doing it to themselves over the past decade regardless of large language models or not. However, that being said, Google is still super dominant and when people say "SEO" they generally mean Google search results. And until my mom stops using Google as the default search, I wouldn't count them out of being the dominant search engine for some time.
While Google certainly has its faults and I am frustrated with its trajectory, I would bet money that this is an article pushing the nonsensical notion that AI language models will replace search engines.
Edit: based on the subtitle, it seems like I am correct.
How is that nonsensical? Seems quite likely to me, especially if they can ground them better in a factual knowledge base. Most search engine queries are looking for information.
I am really perplexed by people talking about the end of traditional web search.
I guess HN users tend to look up lots of facts and whatnot. But generative AI is not a better UX for queries like "LeBron James instagram" or "wordle" or "Avatar 3 release date" or "WSJ" or "Spanish to English" or "cricket news".
Do you people really want AI generated answers? As if the internet wasn't bland enough as it is. This forum has been soapboxing for years about the longtail of blogs and BBs and niche sites, right up to the moment that Bing got chatgpt.
Let me guess what this article and thread will have:
> BIG TECH AI CHATBOT GOLDRUSH!!!!!!
> "Google sucks now, I use Kagi/DDG/Searx instead"
> "I have to quote search to get the results I want. Google has seriously gone downhill"
Can we cut the shit for two seconds? It was never all that great to begin with. None of them were.
Also, these news outlets are just fucking lazy and need to go outside and do actual journalism instead of regurgitating the same trash over and over. ChatGPT is less redundant than they are
But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different.
It's like when Apple came and eat 15-20% of market of notebooks.
Dominance of Microsoft still not ended.
Actually I suspect that Yandex search is better - I like how they preview answers for technical questions. Picture search - seems that Google is the worst.
Maybe it's time to start search different topics in different engines.
Hm. Actually AI could help to implement such functionality
So i tried Bing again after almost a decade for their ChatGTP integration. I can't be the only one who thought this is Yahoo/AltaVista/Lycos/etc. revisited. It's a fucking portal spamming me with news coverage, not a search engine
[+] [-] acqbu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bhilai|3 years ago|reply
From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.
[+] [-] victor106|3 years ago|reply
Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.
The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.
Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.
That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
And I agree, Google does take security more seriously than most places.
[+] [-] breck|3 years ago|reply
IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.
I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!
[+] [-] Dalewyn|3 years ago|reply
Why?
For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).
For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.
[+] [-] hansvm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninth_ant|3 years ago|reply
The monopolistic dominance is the issue. They have too much data and too much power, and leverage that to swallow other market categories. Today they have a deeply unhealthy dominance over the tech industry.
Google could do everything right and still be an existential problem. You say MS has data security issues, okay sure. I’d still rather have them or anyone at 25%+ of the market.
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] singularity2001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revskill|3 years ago|reply
You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.
[+] [-] valley_guy_12|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if the article authors were thinking of Xerox PARC's offices in Palo Alto's hills? Or the road named "Sand Hill Road" that used to have some venture capitalist offices? Other than those offices I can't think of any significant hill-based offices in Silicon Valley.
[+] [-] belval|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BonoboIO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobiekr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|3 years ago|reply
Well ... Not a big one, I grant you, but hill nevertheless :
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4231911,-122.084872,3a,75y,1...
[+] [-] hcks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anothernewdude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcopicentini|3 years ago|reply
Although Google, Maps, Youtube are of daily use they are monetized exclusively by advertising which is annoying and hated by many. It has been many years since Google has launched an innovative new product.
I don't think ChatGPT will gain daily traction after this hype. Anyway we could say that MSFT and AMZN have demostrated more power to innovate with different business models (not only adv) and products.
The GOOG stock has a PE (Price/earning) of 23, while Coca cola 26. So the stock market expect higher growth from CocaCola than Google. Quite surprising.
- GOOGLE PE (23): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/pe-...
- COCA COLA PE (26): https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/pe-rat...
[+] [-] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use.
It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.
[+] [-] dilap|3 years ago|reply
The correct interface for ChatGPT + search is just...ChatGPT. But it can also show you a list of web search results, when it's appropriate.
A super-clean interface, that always shows you exactly what you want.
That would be a killer feature and represent a real threat to Google.
[+] [-] ilc|3 years ago|reply
Google, has all three. The real question is can they not shoot themselves in the foot while doing it.
Also SEO will always target the market leader.
As far as Bing's results: I keep thinking Google is trashy. Then I use Bing and I remember just how good Google is. That's my personal opinion. I am NOT going to claim they are SEO, and spam immune, far from. But they seem to do better than Bing in getting what I mean right.
ChatGPT may help MS, but is it a bandaid? Is it just a good PR bump? Who knows... Displacing Google is a large task.. and not one I'm sure I want MS to win. But I look forward to them trying, if only to make Google do better.
[+] [-] danShumway|3 years ago|reply
The problem with search is not that our answers aren't summarized well, it's that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It's summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.
But it's not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don't know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can't think of any time where I've sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, "You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from."
At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google's AI announcement, I guess?
Maybe I'm just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source/information that I'm looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn't seem helpful to me?
I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn't seem like Google/Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, "why are you making it worse?" But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.
[+] [-] netheril96|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilippkumar|3 years ago|reply
The first is a little more mundane: LLM embeddings. OpenAI currently offers an API that turns sentences into coordinates for a point in some 1536-dimensional conceptual space such that two points are close together if they are conceptually close together. This is insanely powerful. For example, you can generate captions for a bunch of images and store the embeddings for them. Then, you can look for a "picture of a rabbit eating a carrot" by turning that phrase into a 1536-dimensional point and looking for the nearest points around it. Basically, it blows open search technology for everyone. You no longer have to deal with synonyms, idiomatic phrases that mean similar things, misspellings etc - the problems you'd run into when trying to implement simple text search using traditional techniques. It all gets simplified to generating coordinates in some hyperspace and looking for nearest neighbors. This is a total game changer.
The second direction is ChatGPT. Sure, if you want to read a detailed analysis of the demographic situation in China, you'd prefer an article written by an expert. You would still use a search engine, pick a search result and do things the way you do them today. However, there's an entire collection of things that can be answered directly by ChatGPT. For example "how many mins should I hard boil an egg" or "Can I take NyQuil when I'm stoned" or anything else where you really just want a single sentence answer. Today, you launch a browser, search for what you want, skip past the first 10 advertisements, look for a site that seems reasonably reputable, click through all the GDPR warnings, scroll past the banner ads and the SEO optimizing bullshit text to find that one sentence that you wanted all along. Or, you could ask ChatGPT and get an answer instantly. (assuming chatGPT is good enough eventually).
It's hard to predict which of these two technologies will disrupt the current status quo in search. Neither might. But we haven't ever been this close to a level playing field in search since the 1990s. The excitement is hard to resist.
[+] [-] FridgeSeal|3 years ago|reply
Most of my web searches are for looking up specific things, to find the specific link(s) that contains the information I need. These aren’t searches that are going to be made better or faster by an ML model-they’re not natural language queries, they’re just a bunch of terms.
[+] [-] helf|3 years ago|reply
I… don’t really get it either.
But I’m also a cranky person who can’t stand every damn thing being a video whether it makes sense for the content or not, etc.
[+] [-] ghshephard|3 years ago|reply
I do agree though, that without citations to the original source - any "Facts" that ChatGPT offers are absolutely untrustworthy.
[+] [-] zerocrates|3 years ago|reply
Even before this, you've seen the search engines add features to cater to that kind of use, things like Siri handing off questions it didn't understand to a search engine (as well as the other assistants that can do that), indications of this behavior in how companies like Google show themselves being used in ads.
Of course, regardless of the true prevalence of that behavior, it's probably in Google et al.'s favor to encourage that. Regular search sort of inherently cedes some power and control to the pages the results are coming from, where you're sending users away to if their answer isn't right in the snippet. But the "answer box" features, or an LLM that just tells you "the answer to your question" directly on the page keeps you there, treating the search page as your source of information and not somewhere else.
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|3 years ago|reply
Beyond that, most of the results that rank for anything are plainly worse LLM blogspam padded for SEO. All you're doing here is cutting out the middleman.
The problem with chat gpt for factual question search is, of course, that it's not factual. It's job is to produce coherent sentences, not actually tell you factual information. So until they manage to get that right it's not a superior product.
There are two types of search, people looking for a specific resource (like searching for a song on youtube) and people just looking for an answer to a question. If a LLM can be factually accurate, its a superior search product for that specific use, which is probably the majority of search.
[+] [-] postingawayonhn|3 years ago|reply
That said, ChatGPT does a very good job of understanding what I am looking for. If Microsoft could just insert this understanding into its regular search algorithms it would seem likely to significantly improve the quality of search results.
[+] [-] fdgsdfogijq|3 years ago|reply
Its some combination of:
1. ChatGPT is so much better than previous versions that Google themselves was stunned by the utility.
2. Incompetence/Gross negligence across Google
3. No way for them to reconcile the lost ad revenue, so they released nothing. This case is hard to argue for, as they would know theyre a sitting duck.
Regardless I am hoping for a massive Google failure. Theyre the ones responsible for the SEO content waste land that is the modern internet. We have all suffered at the feet of their ad machine
[+] [-] hgsgm|3 years ago|reply
Why are you blaming Google for not being perfect while making the best free search engine, after you spent your whole life refusing to pay for a non-free one?
[+] [-] theonlybutlet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marricks|3 years ago|reply
Touchscreens are the worst interface option. The feedback of feeling a button, or anything made for the job, is better than typing without specific feedback onto a screen. It won out because of you don’t have a set interface it’s bettor.
Now for search, chat gpt will likely always be less reliable than a list of results you can vet yourself for content and source.
That said… I don’t think people care about truth that much these days so one response that feels correct is could be good enough for most. Terrifying times we live in folks.
[+] [-] humanizersequel|3 years ago|reply
Hottest take I've seen on here for a while. In a very specific, very limited set of mobile usecases, buttons may offer a more pleasant experience than a touchscreen. I only say that because there's usually exceptions to any statement, but I can't actually think of one.
Touchscreens didn't win because of some lazy sheep-like consumerism, they won because the product is superior. If Chat-GPT style models defeat traditional search engines it will be because the product is better, not because people are content with a response that "seems correct."
[+] [-] ESMirro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobthepanda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeon|3 years ago|reply
Irony of this article, predicting end of Google, is that articles like this are going to be replaced by these summaries too.
[+] [-] s-xyz|3 years ago|reply
In addition, my gut feeling says that Google does things better than Microsoft.
This comes from my experience with working with Google and GCP products vs working with Microsoft Office/Windows and Azure.
With Google, everything feels consistent, well documented and well presented: from Meet/Gmail to BigQuery, Tensorflow, Cloud SQL, Firebase, etc.
With Microsoft I frequently observe inconsistencies in design patterns, broken links and outdated documentation. Just compare for example Office products, the concept of Office 365, Live Account vs Outlook account, Windows, Bing, Azure products, etc. Basically its hard to find any commonality and it feels that there is generally a lack of vision for the entire suit.
I therefore extrapolate that Google will answer this hype in a more structured way, anchored to a vision, putting it against a grand scheme of things and deliver it as a seemingly integrated solution to the suite.
[+] [-] rexreed|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chias|3 years ago|reply
Edit: based on the subtitle, it seems like I am correct.
[+] [-] rileyphone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardtke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kweingar|3 years ago|reply
I guess HN users tend to look up lots of facts and whatnot. But generative AI is not a better UX for queries like "LeBron James instagram" or "wordle" or "Avatar 3 release date" or "WSJ" or "Spanish to English" or "cricket news".
[+] [-] Invictus0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trieste92|3 years ago|reply
> BIG TECH AI CHATBOT GOLDRUSH!!!!!!
> "Google sucks now, I use Kagi/DDG/Searx instead"
> "I have to quote search to get the results I want. Google has seriously gone downhill"
Can we cut the shit for two seconds? It was never all that great to begin with. None of them were.
Also, these news outlets are just fucking lazy and need to go outside and do actual journalism instead of regurgitating the same trash over and over. ChatGPT is less redundant than they are
[+] [-] Ingaz|3 years ago|reply
But a lot of people fed up with Google and will be glad to try something different.
It's like when Apple came and eat 15-20% of market of notebooks.
Dominance of Microsoft still not ended.
Actually I suspect that Yandex search is better - I like how they preview answers for technical questions. Picture search - seems that Google is the worst.
Maybe it's time to start search different topics in different engines.
Hm. Actually AI could help to implement such functionality
[+] [-] siva7|3 years ago|reply