Google is still about sources. That deserves respect. If this new wave of deep learning AI means sources are hard to find, that's unfair and dangerous because it's hard to validate and correct information. The downfall of using deep learning as a shortcut to the symbolic AI approach. A good AI search result should look like an annotated research paper, or a well curated Wikipedia article.
Google is about advertising. And SEO. The "sources" are generally what their algorithm considers to be 'good sources' but we have no indication that they have any validity. It remains to be seen whether AIs can somehow validate whether a source makes sense. "Reputable" at this point is irrelevant for anything except breaking news. Even in academia, citations dont mean much other than "this person knew how to promote their work well". We live in era of too many citations/references , and that has been detrimental. If we are going to be using machine learning from now on instead of 'reputation' , that is a good thing. At least we can know transparently what are the objectives the ML system is optimizing
Yes, and ultimately a search engine has to be a research tool, to find the best links. If there's a simple answer, it should be right there. That's what snippets were about, though they need development.
Once the search prompts becomes the end point for answers, and they never follow reference links, we're on to something else, something completely different. What happens to the web when that happens? Not many people are talking about that.
Some day I'll happily walk away from Google, but I respect that their model, through schema.org and being based on the open web, creates generally useful metadata. Sure, it's open to being gamed, which has had drastic negative effects, but that's not completely their fault, there's no easy answer to any of this.
> Google is still about sources. That deserves respect.
This isn’t true. They are well-known for taking information from the crawled pages and displaying it directly on the results page so people stop visiting the sources altogether.
This will only accelerate with LLM “search engines”, but let’s not pretend Google’s above doing the same thing. They happily do this themselves.
I have a content website with some tables that I compiled from carefully scouring forums, taking my own measurements, and from people emailing me new info.
Well, Google just displays my tables in the search results, so no one needs to visit my site. This may be great for a user, but it's a real disincentive to create content if Google is just going to scrape it and display it.
Last time I looked, my site ranked #1 for the searches above, but a user would have to scroll through 3 screens worth of whatever else is on a search results page now to get to my link.
I think the proposition for that feature is fair. Some of them are also based on metadata people intentionally add to sites to be used this way. Source content is featured, people can choose to follow it. Everyone wins. In fact you pretty much have to follow the source, because by now we know the answer is not as simple or correct as it seems. Not sure how that translates into a completely synthetic summary that appears to be authorative.
Of course, it would be suicidal for Microsoft to just provide answers, they also want the advertising revenue. But do they expect it to come from the page sources, or something else, which adds its own distortion. Another dimension to examine.
While I get where you are coming from, when observing people around me they just want a query answered and don't care. We will see, I don't think the answer is a well curated wikipedia article because that's just too much information. The AI use-cases so far involve that you have a question you want an answer, the rest I think can be server by good old search, which will still exist.
All the benefits of deep learning (natural language understanding, context, engaging answers) make this ergonomically possible and not able to be replicated using symbolic AI. It's frankly irrelevant to the discussion right now and will at best imho only play some part in the overall process. If attributable sources are important, I think it's way likelier that a deep learning approach will be used. But I think for most queries answered by an AI this will not be important since they will be trivial and I expect for the rest you switch to the normal search behaviour to be able to trust your source.
In a larger sense, this is true, for now. But it's not a reasonable shortcut to supply information that is presented as correct but is in fact partially made up. Either there will be a well deserved public backlash, or in a pretty real way, reality will be irrecoverably warped.
It's pretty hard to imagine any answer that is useful, no matter how trivial, if it's wrong 20% of the time. Deep Learning is an amazing parlour trick that can be useful in the right circumstances, which basically means an expert has to be present to interpret its results.
I'm not convinced having a fully padded conversation is what people want. I find it annoying. Google was on the right path with snippets, they just need to make them easier to consume and emphasize the fact the search can be continued. I think Google is being very conservative, partially for safety reasons, but also because they won't take chances if they don't have to.
Of course, all these searches would be much more useful if they had more intimate knowledge of the searcher, but that's another dangerous path.
> It's pretty hard to imagine any answer that is useful, no matter how trivial, if it's wrong 20% of the time
But that means that the error is independent of the search term. That's not my experience. Of course you can't trust it 100% but I think it's pretty good for easy searches to a degree that I would trust it to be correct. You have to get used to the tool. If the accuracy is good enough for easy search terms for people to get some use out of it, then we have a product I think. Of course it's probabilistic but even wikipedia is wrong sometimes. These things won't be correct, it's always an approximation, but that's also a reality of live. Information is inherently unreliable and so are our tools.
Just view those tools as you would view humans. They help, they can be wrong, and if you need confidence you have to get some sources. At least that's how I would view them.
Wether this all works out is another question. But it's an approach different to search as it exists and may complement it. People thought Siri would revolutionise everything and then it didn't.
I agree with what you are staying, but any time it's presented as more than a research tool, maybe useful for the most trivial answers, it's a problem. It should be emphasized that it is based on sources and helps scour and fake-summarize them, but despite Microsoft calling it a "copilot for the web," that's not how it's being received. It would simply be better if every statement it made were referenced.
You can see where any result Google gives you has come from. Ask it for the weather today and it'll say at the bottom that it's sourced from weather.com.
And how did it pick the facts out of these sources and compile it into a conclusion? That is a black box you will simply have to either trust or second guess everything it replies with. The first choice is naivety and the second choice is arguably a poor product.
A more honest "knowledge engine" would be one that did not draw conclusions but simply replied with the links relevant to your question, letting you judge the quality and draw your own conclusions to not have the engine carry that burden itself.
And then you are back to a traditional search engine again.
> would be one that did not draw conclusions but simply replied with the links relevant
Thats neglecting the facts that humans lie and are opaque as well. You never know when a "reputable" person will stop being reputable. How ML vets its sources is going to be the relevant question going forward. While MLs are black boxes, their objectives and measures are not, and the companies should make them transparent. After all, it is only going to increase trust to their systems
The Google-accessible web has become a small set of pages hyper optimized to serve the maximum of ads and meet arbitrary Google metrics. Many of which are user-hostile such as forcing long visits on pages, leading to burying information deep in a page, it have been added in an attempt to limit spam.
The "sources" for Google have become a competitor between spammers.
I fear what may happen once the world starts trying to game AI results towards their own commercial interests.
Spammers ruined Google, at least for my use cases. What will spammers do to AI?
Google. I'm done with Google search and waiting for some new competition. My results are filled with spam and cloned fake sites. I barely use Google any more
In the context of LLM AIs vs. traditional search engines, I tried this one. The results were...hilarious to say the least.
> what is fc barcelona's latest result
> FC Barcelona's latest result is a 2-1 win against Real Betis in La Liga on February 5th, 2023
Half truths, whole lies. Barcelona's last game was in Feb 5 indeed but against Sevilla at a 3-0 scoreline [1]. The 2-1 win against Betis was in Feb 1 [2].
In fairness this escaped me. Pretty close to the truth. What tipped me off was my next question:
> who scored the goals
> FC Barcelona's goalscorers in their 2-1 win against Real Betis on February 5th, 2023 were Ángela Sosa, Rinsola Babajide and Natalia Montilla.
Bro, I've no idea who those people are and they certainly aren't FCB first team members.
(Unfortunately, ChatGPT is at capacity atm so I can't replicate the same experiment. Maybe Perplexity is just a poorly-written/trained bot.)
In contrast, I just have to type "fc barcelona" in Google to get their most recent results accurately; then click on those results to see who scored the goals, accurately once more. It even helps correlate the actual game date to the confusing "matchday" league taxonomy.
My point being, LLMs have been impressive in their current iteration but I don't think they will replace traditional search anytime soon. Maybe it will eat at the market share but I don't think this is an existential threat to Google. Even the fact that ChatGPT is at capacity at the moment says something about the real-world viability of LLMs as search engines. 2012 called and is asking if you are web-scale.
They don't seem lethargic when you look at the list of just their cancelled projects.
Sam Altman just seems to be behaving like any regular CEO here. Praising their company's tech integration into Microsoft, which will pay them a fortune. Saying Google search is old and lethargic and Bing is amazing.
It may turn out to be true, but consider the source.
I love that people are not recognizing the fact that Google has been doing this ChatGPT stuff (to an extent) for years now. "People also ask", "Featured Snippets", the sidebar card panel for big topics.
All Google has to do now is redo their UI a bit to make you the user feel like they are experiencing the ChatGPT experience.
It's also obscenely hilarious how much hype there is around this whole topic, knowing very well that neither Google or Bing will turn their search engines into the actual ChatGPT interface.
You think Google is about to wipe out its ad business to appease a small portion of its userbase? Think again.
Why couldn’t you show ads next to the responses as usual? AFAICT the main new feature here is AI responses next to/above links, and if there’s links on a page then there could be ads.
Either that or they switch google search to display ads and everyone looses their minds at once
I think to be a little more specific and accurate here, we could view Google as very much needing to protect its "golden goose".
It has this massively profitable search business that it needs to protect at all costs. It doesn't want to be seen as a competitor to everyone publishing web content. If it answers questions in the SERPs it will consume screen space from in-search ads and reduce page clicks to pages that show Google's ads. So I think that is less about lethargy and more about being scared to disrupt itself. If it shows some AI-generated content that is perceived negatively it could cause reputational damage (like Boston Dynamics was) and cause advertisers to not advertise with Google.
And this fear is a classical instance of a large company being scared to do anything that could hurt its primary business, which reduces innovation and its ability to act in a forward-thinking way. This gives a chance to competitors that don't have this same fear of hurting their profitable business. Often these are upstarts like OpenAI.
Google's been answering certain questions above the fold in the SERPs for a while, sometimes very well, other times hilariously badly.
I'm not sure Bing doing the same thing a bit more with technology probably less suited for typical search questions is quite as disruptive as is being made out...
This development of search engines becoming answer finding machines doesn't sit well with me. It seems that they are confounding two use cases:
1) I want to find a certain website
2) I want to find an answer to this question I have
These often overlap, but not always. Google used to be great at 1), then progressively started to solve 2). LLMs are better at 2), but are useless at 1). It's like Google wanted to become a search engine for people who don't even know what a website is and just go to Google for 2).
I think the products "search engine" and "chat bot" should stay separate.
However, I'd like to see LLMs merged with WolframAlpha.
Using google to find specific websites, only amounts to me typing hacker news or facebook. That's about it. My main bulk of queries are question based, but I'm also from a previous era, where I throw keywords at Google rather than questions, which is a learned response from back then. I do 'ask' google assistant questions, and it doesn't do a bad job at it. I would love it to be a glorified PA and general knowledgeable 'person' I can go to for advice.
At the same time, I've containered much of my interaction with Google so it can't draw on my past history. So I have no idea what I'm missing. It did have a tendency to feedback loop a bit too much for me in the past, pigeon holing me to specific websites. There's a huge trust issue, you leak your ID in about four common regular queries so I'm not so sure I can even beat it.
Imagine teaching an LLM to guess whether the user wants 1 or 2, and in the case of links it can curate the best ones based on their exhaustive logs of your browsing history and demographics. A beautiful, technically stunning, only slightly dystopian future
The core point here is that search isn’t going away, LLMs are just being added on top. They’re not gonna just turn off their page ranking algos, cause LLMs are worse than useless without cited sources
3) Filter out SEO spam and other crap out of the two.
Which is slowly becoming worse, and I'd imagine that would only accelerate now that would-be SEO spammer could just feed ChatGPT like and get a prompt for reasonable (for search engine bot) article
When Google started putting ads at the top of their search results that looks exactly like the organic search results (only differentiated with a tiny "Ad" label) is when they truly lost me.
Everything up until that point I could attribute to ignorance and laziness instead of malice. But at some point somebody at Google suggested that a new way to drive ad clicks could be to confuse and trick their users, and everybody else in the room nodded along.
A low point for sure, but given a pass because the ads are meant to be relevant to the search. In many cases the ad links would satisfy the search intent. Unlike youtube videos which put ads for Big Macs and other horrible things on random videos.
But why pretend ads won't infect "ChatAI" services:
User: "Find and read me a nostalgic poem from the 19th century"....
[processing]....
ChatAI: "Introducing the Chicken Mince Big Mac with Super Special Sauce Combo Deluxe Mega Pack! For a limited time only".....
"He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day..."
On most porn sites, you don't have autoplay forced up your throat. They also have a much better recommendation system, that doesn't recommend you completely irrelevant or sponsored content.
ChatGPT have changed the game and Google is finally forced to compete again. However, people who say it's doom and gloom for Google can't see the forest for the trees.
1. Google is one of the most beloved brands in the world. Only Apple's brand is stronger.
2. Chrome has taken over Windows and it's the default browser on Android. Also, Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on iOS.
3. Bing.com on desktop is already years behind Google in UI & UX. Add the ChatGPT part on the right side of the search results and it gets from bad to worse.
4. Google will release a competent answer to ChatGPT at I/O 2023. It's going to be much more polished than Microsoft's version. Microsoft will steal some users from Google but Google will recover. Like Satya Nadella said in the recent The Verge interview, they are looking to steal away one user at a time.
Is Google beloved? It was good. I use YouTube and the experience sucks now, google kills all the cool software they make too. People grudgingly use it but it's not beloved by users. Advertisers might be different.
I'm not really on here much, normal people noticed services like whatever chat in gmail being killed, the search sucking, and YouTube getting ad everywhere sucked. Some google products are loved though like Chromecast and Google fiber when it was around.
Yes, I was referring, among other things, to a recent tweet where he calls OpenAI "his" startup. Some of his coworkers may find that irksome, as he was not there when GPT2 was released. (If I understand correctly)
Ok, but I think the transition from Transformers to GPT took a lot of hard work and insight, and the OpenAI research team deserves ample credit for it.
Sure, the research teams involved. I only bring up Google because it's ironic Sam is shitting on them for the tech they shared with everyone and made OpenAI possible.
Curious about your choice of “worried”. Are you rooting for openai? I love chatgpt and dalle but now that they’re effectively a Microsoft subsidiary I’m not empathizing with them in the slightest. Plus Sam has kinda always been like that, no?
Worried in the sense that their products have the potential to be harmful. But yes, otherwise I am rooting for OpenAI. Why not? I don't have a horse in this race.
Fair thanks for the response! I guess deep down I kinda am, too. I don’t want to because I find Mr. Altman to be a particularly loathsome capitalist executive, but gosh they’ve just been so exciting the past year or two.
Sam Altman is not a 'ChatGPT founder' and he's the PR man for a research institution, not a business, so he's should be wary of comparing his org. to Google.
Though he's obviously right.
What's interesting is that so few people are in a position to say it out loud.
That says a lot about the power dynamics of the Tech World.
Sam obviously has another 'lazy monopoly' to protect him from the fallout from his PR statements; or more likely they're chosen words and he's now working for the 'other lazy monopoly' saying what Satya does won't say.
Everyone should recognize the fact this language is being used as a welcome shakeup in the system.
When Epic spoke out against Apple they failed to start a revolution and paid a heavy price, though it's likely they did get some balls rolling.
If any of you are younger than 30 it might literally have been since you were a teenager that we had a lot of 'game' in the system.
Things have consolidated in the last decade, it really did used to be much more wild.
I'm not being cynical, negative or even 'harshly Darwinian' when I state that I really hope one of the Big Cos crashes and burns. The system needs to be loosened up. We don't need 'decentralization' but we do need out from under the thumb of the very powerful tech companies.
I just generated a C# code snippet with ChatGPT, converting an integer to a base32 string. On a glance, it looked correct. But it could impossibly have generated the given answer because it helpfully claimed how it used Crockford's Base32 algorithm (that avoids I, L, 0 and U) and had correctly adapted the code for that. However, the answer had an "L" in it. So it could impossibly be correct. And indeed, the entire answer was bogus. And besides, it forgot to tell that this algorithm also avoided "U" in its explanation of what characters it avoided.
ChatGPT is littered with these things once you actually get down to business with it.
This raises many philosophical questions for me. Is the AI hype trumping responsibility? When is AI good enough? "Always check your sources", sure, but the point with AI is that it can, and will, reply to questions where sources are missing by compiling a very large sum of knowledge and drawing conclusions.
Do you think these are words Sam will have to eat up? Of course, Google search results can also lie, but at least you know which kinds of sites you are looking at and if they are renowned. The new Bing Chat AI _will_ list its sources but it's still drawing conclusions and compiling facts from cherry picked data from the sites. So you still end up squinting, second guessing it.
I'm sure I will jump on to the new Bing AI ASAP, hell I'm a computer engineer after all and get hyped about these things, but I also admit that the failure of LLM/GPT AI to admit uncertainty, but conversely also be very willing to be bold. A dangerous combination if there ever was one that I think is an early red flag we should heed to.
I very much feel like Google today is going through what Meta went through for the last 5 years, and what MSFT went through in the early 2010s. Everyone absolutely insisting the company was dying and that the end was nigh.... whilst the company absolutely continued to crush it. Yes yes innovators dilemma, sure. Do you think maybe Google also know about the innovators dilemma? Do you think maybe the fact that they basically invented big chunks of the underlying tech for this indicates that they're not going to just sit on their hands?
Even if Bing successfully sticks a ChatGPT into it's search engine to give you a first good guess before you have to look at the actual search results... do you know what will happen? Google will do the same, and everyone will keep using Google. Why? Because if the ChatGPT answer is wrong, no one wants to pay the price of using Bing. Google has an enormous incumbency advantage. Search is going nowhere.
Again, going back to the comparison, everyone is still using Windows, every is still using Facebook. They're no longer the new sexy innovative thing, but they're both enormous and massively useful as leverage to push into other markets. Microsoft Azure exists entirely as a result of Microsoft's leverage that they established with Windows.
Google lost their way since 2015. What used to be a beacon of innovation and inspiration to push forward has stagnated into an also-ran of amazing but boring tech.
Absolutely YouTube has been the most successful Social Network of last 7 years. It is amazingly powerful and I use it daily. But, Google bought Youtube in 2006 and the platform largely benefited from improvements in networking and productivity tools more than in product innovations.
With ChatGPT I use Google search significantly less when writing code and debugging errors.
What's the point of search if most I can get are promoted results?
The fact that Google has an honestly enormous investment into AI for years invalidates this statement, probably the biggest of all players. Google has the skill to quickly produce a competitor, they have a lot of experience and capabilities in the ML-area. They were also so early that you can't frame them as a slow moving monopoly.
An early investment and strong commitment does not guarantee for you to be the first, as we have seen with ChatGPT. But I think google can move so quickly that it won't matter much.
This also means we are not yet in AI-Winter. Yeah!
Not to be snarky, but investing in AI and building amazing products around it are two different shoes.
I am developing quite heavily in AI and hardly found a use for Google's ecosystem. Colab is nice, I guess but the documentation is impossible to comprehend and just running a local Jupyter notebook to test a few things is usually much more efficient.
Counter point would be often you want to land on page crafter by a human rather than an AI summary. Especially with the provenance of who wrote it and trust in that site. The irony being this story is interesting because Sam Altman is involved in it as much as what it has to say. Where as asking chatgpt what it thinks of Google strategy would produce the usual drivel - but even if it were great drivel it would still not be a real viewpoint produced by someone with insight, so you couldn’t trust it much deeper than basic facts.
>Counter point would be often you want to land on page crafter by a human rather than an AI summary.
I might pay for this if this was indeed possible. A very big chunk of the results on a typical google search are to algorithmically-generated content, and this will probably only grow.
AI in serps is like self-driving tech in cars; and Google is like Mercedes who has a reputation and trust to lose when delivering half-ass results (the way Tesla ships products).
CEO sees tremendous benefits in business buying his product. He is confident his product can help displace "lethargic" market leader. Not exactly news.
The serenity with which ChatGPT provides false information, the lack of alternative responses and sources in the answers makes for a quite a challenge for a search engine. Can it be done in a way that dethrones Google? I'll believe it when I see it.
Maybe a basking shark filtering masses plankton but it’s no great white.
A great white would have launched a GPT api competitor far earlier and recognised the search replacement use case.
GPT3 came out in 2020. People had used it as a search like function in 2020, we’re coming up to 3 years and only now they’ve acted to then bum rush into a competitor that’s demo tanked the stock?
There is not much debate about it, Google did not see this coming, and so far they are reacting poorly, but this is expected.
ChatGPT demos only highlighted the fact that search could be so much better than what we have today, people were already disappointed/bored by Google search, but the status quo was seen as too entrenched. Now Google search is really looking bad and outdated, and quite a lot of us are realizing that something much better is possible.
The AI war has started, this is good, healthy competition, for once.
> The AI war has started, this is good, healthy competition, for once.
As much as I don't like SEO driven search I'm not sure if this is right direction. From technical point of view it could be but I'm worried how this will be gamed.
Difficult to predict, the current state of ML might not be practical yet, only time will tell.
I have no idea about the potential roadblocks ahead. But we can all see the potential.
The thing is, old search is dead (and has been for a while if we're being honest) so it will be replaced by something at some point.
No matter what, I believe that monopolies are bad and competition is good, but of course we could end up with something even worse than what Google search is today.
$10BN is enough for Microsoft to pay Sam Altman to say such nonsense in the name of AI hype.
We need another Stable Diffusion-like disruption for ChatGPT and GPT-4 involving open-sourcing the model and being a rather smaller model which can run on device to ruin ClosedAI's rent seeking.
Every time they try to innovate or expand, they shoot themselves in the foot. They might have to stop comparing any endeavour they take with their Search revenue and let them fly free for a decade or so before making such U-turn decisions (talking about Stadia here)
Reminds me of the time one of the Netscape founders called Windows a “Poorly Debugged Set of Device Drivers”. That really got Microsoft moving and a few years later IE6 won the first browser war.
It’s cloud storage for photos - hardly a category defining product comparable to search, maps, docs, or android - and it absolutely comes with Android.
How many iPhone users skip apple photos and install google photos like they do with maps?
It's far more than that cloud storage for photos. It might come with Android but so does YouTube and Search, that doesn't make them part of Android. It sounds like you don't use it so maybe you shouldn't have such a strong opinion about it.
>How many iPhone users skip apple photos and install google photos like they do with maps?
Given it had over 1B active users back in 2019, my bet would be on "a lot".
No I have it installed here as I used to own an Android phone. Maybe you should consider being quiet about Google Photos yourself since, three comments in, you can’t provide any details about why this little regarded photo app is so remarkable?
> Given it had over 1B active users back in 2019, my bet would be on "a lot".
Those are mostly Android users, or ex-Android users as discussed. You are the first human being I have ever met that has specifically praised Google photos over the competition and you can't tell me why, so I'm not inclined to change my mind about that.
> YouTube and Search, that doesn't make them part of Android.
That's true. But people specifically choose YouTube (acquired 2006) and Search (launched 1997) over competitors, as discussed. I'd be surprised if Settings or the Android lock screen didn't have a billion users. That doesn't make them significant.
So yes: Google haven’t released a major product in fifteen years.
Logged in Hacker News users clicked the small equilateral triangle that points upwards sufficient number of times for score from the decay algorithm to move this above other stories whose score from the decay algorithm was lower.
He's touching a current topic with the launch of Bing AI which many consider might be transformative. But yes, "we" should know better at Hacker News and separate the mud slinging from the news.
Why don't you go ahead and open Bing.com interface right now and search for some things. Do come back and explain to me in detail the "good chance" they stand.
Hey, ive heard good things about that guy that build that giant potatoe cannon. Big Head, big Brain, lots of great things to come. You dont just become Vice president of spite for nothing.
lethargic
adj 1: deficient in alertness or activity; "bullfrogs became
lethargic with the first cold nights" [syn: {lethargic},
{unenrgetic}] [ant: {energetic}]
Lethargic and lethargies comes from the old Greek (or was it Latin, too lazy to check). It's a relatively common loan word in most of the European languages. My guess is that for most slightly educated non-native English speakers that word is more likely to be known than its English equivalent if it exists.
