[HN Gopher] AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines ___________________________________________________________________ AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines Author : jiwidi Score : 43 points Date : 2022-12-25 21:31 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (iai.tv) (TXT) w3m dump (iai.tv) | kewrkewm53 wrote: | Right now I find ChatGTP excellent for certain technical topics | I'm familiar with, but can't recall the details. It saves me the | time of looking for an example from stackoverflow/tutorial | blogs/official documentation, and gives me just the piece I want | - things like syntax, which libraries/modules to use etc. | geoffreypoirier wrote: | Completely agree. It's my fast rust remover for when diving | back in, plus gives me the strong leads on docs, syntax, | modules. | type4 wrote: | It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact- | checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is | much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results | can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the | subject matter already, you won't really know that. | | That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for | stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double | checking the output to see how it's wrong. | m_mueller wrote: | and by extension: the ability and expression of doubt / | humility. knowing what you don't know is when you reach a | certain maturity, which so far all these AIs seem to lack. | forrestthewoods wrote: | That's not particularly different from comments on HackerNews | and Reddit. There's a lot of extremely confident and very | wrong answers on both sites! | | ChatGPT is probably more wrong more often, by a good margin. | But I don't think the argument "it's confidently wrong" | carries any weight. Humans are extremely susceptible to | humans who display confidence. It'd probably be a good thing | if humans were as skeptical of confident humans as they need | to be of confident chat/search bots. | smadge wrote: | The problem is that fact checking functionality is a harder | NLP/ML problem than bullshit generation. | maremmano wrote: | Sundararajan is it you? | | unfortunately (or fortunately) it is a matter of time. | n0tth3dro1ds wrote: | I agree that chat bots aren't the proper modality for replacing | search. So what? Currently, Google search results stink. ChatGPT | results are way better in a number of domains. Does it need to be | a chat bot? No. But Google still stinks now. I'll take anything | that can just find the correct information. | lerchmo wrote: | Google search results are a vortex of perverse incentives and | double dipping. The fact that google ranks horrible CPM | arbitrage websites for nearly everything AND monetizes these | websites... yuck. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to imagine | how some of these AI Models could leverage a search index + | something like wolfram alpha to generate a much more targeted | and valuable search result. | joe_the_user wrote: | _it doesn 't take a rocket scientist to imagine how some of | these AI Models could leverage a search index + something | like wolfram alpha to generate a much more targeted and | valuable search result._ | | Sure but the problem with the rocket scientists is they think | about how good things can be, not how evil they can be. Sure, | a chat bot could be made to give very valuable-to the end | user results but as it will free like Google, results | yielding-profits-to-company will be given, in the fashion you | describe Google doing. | lerchmo wrote: | That is the back side of the arc, the (maybe inevitable) | decline into collecting monopoly profits. I think people | are excited about these language models as way to crack the | Monopoly with something that delivers more value to users. | joe_the_user wrote: | Google certainly sinks for my purposes. But these current | results are exactly what happens a company carefully calculates | the monetization involved in retrieving information. Open AI | isn't calculating the monetization of ChatGPT's answers and | doesn't have a real business plan (paid chat won't go further | than paid search imo). The thing is, once Open AI engages in | the calculations done by Google, having the results seem to | come from an "intelligence" can only make the effect worse | (though I suspect Google will also tend to look like an | intelligence/chatbot too as things progress, the future looks | ugly) | megablast wrote: | Google has ruined the web. Look what they did to recipe sites?? | Truly awful. | | And there used to be sites that answered the question on the | search page. Google pushed them to the bottom. | lerchmo wrote: | Yeah, they are responsible for those 5 minute scroll sessions | above the recipes. They rank and monetize those horrible | sites. | dpkirchner wrote: | I've stopped using unqualified Google searches for recipes. | Limiting results to allrecipes.com helps a fair amount | (they're a pretty unobnoxious site as things go). It's | telling that Google doesn't rank them higher. | charcircuit wrote: | How does Google stink? I've never had an issue with. What query | does it struggle with? | williamtrask wrote: | This is a great point. | | Followup question - is LLM tech more or less likely to end up | replacing search when those same incentives really saturate the | LLM product itself. | | One big difference seems to be attribution. LLMs don't tell you | where their info comes from. They just say what is (but can be | asked to cite works - with mixed results). | | Will LLMs get good at citing sources and if not will people | care or will they give in to LLMs as a source of information | that's "good enough because it mostly works" | | From a product placement / ads perspective, being able to | persuade people to fully accept everything an ad-infused LLM | says because it's good enough seems like an incredibly | lucrative product bundling opportunity if they can get it | right. Esp. If they can use that to convince regulators they | can't annotate the difference between ads and non ads. | | Seems pretty dystopian from a disinformation perspective | though. | andrewstuart wrote: | Without wanting to be facetious, the single word response that | comes to mind is "yet". | joe_the_user wrote: | Google is more "chatty" than it was a few years ago and ChatGPT | is a quickly moving target it seems - it's answers seem more | "search-like" than they seemed when I started playing with it | just a few weeks ago (more caveats and more likely to give | multiple options, etc). It seems like we'll have fusion soon. | | I agree the results will be unpleasant. I already despise | Google's fucking "looks like there aren't many results" message | and there will be more to hate down the road. But still, | appearing to give "an answer" rather than reporting information | seems like a winning quality to bring in the masses. As someone | pointed out, Google's target audience is inherently those | credulous enough to be valuable targets for their advertisers. | mc32 wrote: | The big drawback chatGPT has is that on many topics it walks on | eggshells. | | It can't give me a direct answer. It couches the answers in | nonsensical caveats. Adding stilted context that really does not | add value to an answer and actually makes the search more | tedious. | | If I ask it the male female breakdown for crime statistics it | begins to get defensive and gives me general answers. I can prod | it to finally give me government statistics but it doest it | begrudgingly. And that's for a far away country not steeped in | any unusual crime controversy. | permo-w wrote: | you can say a lot about Google, but at least they've never sat | down and said "no more porn", or blocked specific words from | being searched, which is a little surprising actually. I'm sure | bigger advertisers will have broached the subject on many | occasions | nomel wrote: | A chat bot isn't allowed to use external APIs or present things | besides conversational text? Seems short sighted. | | Todays chat bots should be considered dumb prototypes, when | thinking about even the near future. | shagie wrote: | Today's chatbots are complex language models based on the | language that they were trained on. | | They are very clever at transforming data into language, or one | language into another... but they work on _language_ and not | _knowledge_. | | It would be interesting to see a language model identify the | necessary resources to fulfill a query which is then fed back | into it to transform the dry data back into language. | Identify if the question is looking for weather, sports scores, | unit conversion, general knowlege, or business information for | the following requests: 1. "What is the high | temperature tommorow?" 2. "Did the packers win last | night?" 3. "What time does Walmart open?" 4. | "What will it rain next week?" 5. "Where can I buy an | umbrella?" 6. "How many feet are in a mile?" | Question classification: | | To which GPT responded: 1. Weather 2. | Sports Scores 3. Business Information 4. | Weather 5. Business Information 6. Unit | Conversion | | Using this, it should then be sent to a system that knows how | to do those queries and return back data. | | However, doing that integration isn't the place for today's | chatbots - or at least not the place for OpenAI to be trying to | do all the possible things. Those queries _also_ cost money and | become harder to bill for. | lerchmo wrote: | I mean you can give chatgtp API docs and it will write the | actual code to find the answers. | shagie wrote: | Do you trust it to write that bug free? | | Where are you putting the API key to access those services? | | Where does it run the code that it wrote and how does it | provision those resources? | christmaspizza wrote: | Yeah this is a weird take. Chat bots are improving rapidly, | increasingly used in real applications. With more targeted | applications, like a "search engine" for coding, I could see | these being very powerful. It's weird to write an article | discounting that based on how the current ChatGPT application, | a research beta, operates and throwing out some fear-based | morality. | userbinator wrote: | They are not a replacement, but unfortunately search engines are | turning into AI chatbots too. | | When I think of a search engine I want a "grep for the Internet", | not an "AI". | | Looking up part numbers for ICs and other electronic components | is the most prominent application where search engines like | Google have gotten far worse in recent years, and AI ain't going | to work there either. | enlyth wrote: | A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users | want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who | structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I | tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of | what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots") | | I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of | more technical search engine for developers and the classic | Google experience where some neural network tries to make sense | of your poorly written human language phrased question | rtkwe wrote: | We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because | sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to | get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation | at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going | back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search. | skwirl wrote: | Mods need to edit the headline of this to match the title of the | page. Nothing stating or implying this headline appear in the | article and it feels like an attempt to troll HN. | asimjalis wrote: | Eventually Chatbots will start inserting product placement ads as | well. So comparing the ads on Google with the ad free ChatGPT | experience is detracting from the real value of ChatGPT. | | Google results are mostly ok. But I have to do the synthesis. | ChatGPT does the synthesis for me saving me time and mental | bandwidth. This is the part that I find valuable. | kyleyeats wrote: | "Have you tried Bing? It's great for questions like this." | halukakin wrote: | Today I experienced just the opposite. Chatgpt answered some | business questions in less than a minute. I would have spent 30 | mins in seo optimized sites to find the exact same info. | kmoser wrote: | It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT is monetized to slip | in some paid content, similar to product placement. Until then, | I'm sure bright minds are already working on ways to ensure it | feeds on data tainted with their own agendas. | bombcar wrote: | How do you verify that chatgpt answers are correct? (And to be | honest, how do you gauge the correctness of random internet | sites)? | TOMDM wrote: | To speak to GP's point, a number of times already I've failed | to find something immediately on Google, asked chatgpt, | gotten an answer and then used Google to verify chatgpt's | answer. | | Google is great if you already know exactly what you're | looking for, for a lot of topics chatgpt is already better | than Google if you don't | mustafabisic1 wrote: | But they have the potential. We'll see if it breaks into public. | | People at some point were even saying Tikto will replace search | engines. | | Both of which can still happen. | cactusplant7374 wrote: | I don't think they do. At least not in a safe way. The AI | doesn't understand meaning or the underlying material and | concepts. I'm sure filters will be put into a pipeline but it | will never be as good as letting the human sniff out the | correct answers. | lerchmo wrote: | "Will never be" is an overly confident statement for any | technical field. Predicting the future is hard and predicting | the future with an un-bounded time horizon is pretty near | impossible. | forgotusername6 wrote: | Today I asked chatGPT what Einstein's favourite food was. It | gave a reasonable answer about him liking simple foods. The | worrying thing is that I was satisfied with the result. It | was plausible. It could well be true. There is a good chance | that this kind of AI might provide the right kind of response | that a large percentage of the public find convincing enough | to not bother with additional research. | eastbound wrote: | The universal truth for people is often different than the | truth, and AI has to return the convenient truth. | | Example. People are persuaded that women can do two things | at the same time and men cannot. Despite countless | counterexamples, the original study positioning everyone on | a bell curve with only 6% difference in time of execution, | and without checking for the quality of the results ("254 | plus 786 equals 126 quick mafs!!!"), it is blatantly false, | but any search engine that would return that it is false | would make itself rejected by humans. | bombcar wrote: | This reminds me of an article about how phones killed | ripley's believe it or not and the Guinness book of records | - both of which are kind of like "solidified" bar | conversation. Now if someone at the bar asks about | Einstein's favorite foods, people just whip out phones and | find an answer (doesn't even have to be correct) and the | conversation ends. Before you could go all night discussing | it from attempts at first principles - you might be | entirely wrong but you had fun. | nomel wrote: | Are we talking about chat bots, or their implementations in | 2022? | [deleted] | KhoomeiK wrote: | Recent paper showing how LMs "struggle with less popular factual | knowledge, and that scaling fails to appreciably improve | memorization of factual knowledge in the tail". In other words, | simply scaling LLMs will not result in replacing Google as a | search engine. Approaches like theirs ie retrieval augmentation | are needed. | | https://akariasai.github.io/files/llm_memorization.pdf | | This is essentially what I'm building for the content marketing | vertical. | [deleted] | TOMDM wrote: | Today I wanted to mute the bark on windows 11. | | Not knowing the terminology, Google was useless. | | I ask chatgpt and it tells me how to mute notifications, I | clarify "no the thing where you're typing and windows can't do it | so it plays a sound" and chatgpt happily informed me on how to | mute the windows hard stop sound. | | For situations where you don't really know what you're looking | for, chatgpt is already competitive with Google. Failing | abysmally in some cases, and far surpassing Google in others. | yakattak wrote: | I worked on a chat bot to help solve technical issues. It would | parse what the user wanted and then search the already | established articles we had that were ingested into | Elasticsearch. | | At first, we started with a goal of fully conversational AI. So, | for example, it would ask a question based on the article and | give you a choice, you could then type your choice. This became a | nightmare for the model so we added buttons instead. | | Then, before we knew it, this "bot" was just a glorified search | engine that feigned being a bot. Towards the end of it I | scratched my head and said "did we even replace the current | knowledgebase? are we spending thousands on something that adds | no value?" | | I don't think chatbots are it either. I think we could have just | replaced the KB search with Elasticsearch and been done with it, | no need for any ML. | thexumaker wrote: | Yep had the same realization a while back building something | similar for our internal docs on notion for a hackathon. I | realized that if notion just had a better search engine we | wouldn't need anything else built on top | nunodonato wrote: | Can you elaborate on what the problem was? What became a | nightmare for the model? | forrestthewoods wrote: | Counter-point: Yes they are. I'm already successfully using | ChatGPT as a Google replacement for many types of searches. | | You're welcome to argue it isn't a replacement. And yet my own | two eyes observe indisputable evidence to the contrary. | skilled wrote: | When ChatGPT came out I used it to do 100 hours worth of work in | 10 hours or so. But it still felt like work. And for more | intricate use cases it is just easier to do traditional research. | | We're safe for a while still. And when I say we I mean writers. | ArjenM wrote: | It's like putting a dusty book back on the digital shelve, now | you need to have a conversation to do a simple search query | that's hidden in marketing gibberish? | | I'm, still seeing the whole push in this product range hang with | the call to make the search functions of most search engines more | garbage than the actual chatbot. | | As if Marketing is steering this ship. | | I'm sticking to my own knowledge and trusted independent sources | for now, no need to have something make up an entire world for | you, just to trap you in a cage of ones own making for real this | time? | gkoberger wrote: | I mean, ChatGPT came out 2 weeks ago. | | By the time Google even was started, Excite had been searching | the web for 7 years and Lycos had been around for 3 years. | | I don't think it's a 1:1 replacement, but let's not judge a | product that's been out for less than a month against a trillion | dollar behemoth that launched 24 years ago. | gumboza wrote: | They're not a replacement but they will be generating so much | credible indexable garbage that they will reduce the signal to | noise ratio to the point that they are useless. | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | They absolutely are, whoever wrote this has no idea what they're | talking about. | tobyhinloopen wrote: | Maybe not, but it's already very useful. | NicoJuicy wrote: | What I haven't seen here, is that AI chatbots remove the | discovery process. | | While you can get an option from a chatbot for your specific | request, sometimes you can get something better while googling | for possible solutions. | gvurrdon wrote: | Assuming this refers to https://chat.openai.com/, it's rather | difficult to try it out. After creating an account it demanded a | phone number. Of course, I will not supply my own, and temporary | ones I tried were either recognised as such or rejected has | having already been used. | gukov wrote: | The way I see it: | | - Today's search engines will give you links to millions of | documents | | - ChatGPT, if asked correctly, will instead generate one perfect | document based on millions of the documents | | To me, that's a clear evolution of the search engine, especially | with all the SEO & ad spam that's plaguing Google and others | currently. | | I wasn't ready to pay a monthly fee for an ad-free Google. I am | ready to pay for something like ChatGPT. | | Google has an issue on their hands and is probably working | overtime to lobby the threat of ChatGPT away. | dilap wrote: | ChatGPT can give you websites, too, if you ask: | | "What's a good social website for people of a technical bent" | | It recommended: Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Quora, | LinkedIn, ResearchGate, GitHub | | That's a pretty good list! | | Tried the same search on Google, and the first result was some | spammy site "15 top social networks," #1 being facebook. Not | very useful. | | I definitely think chatbots will replace many uses of search | engines. It's already way more useful for lots of stuff for me. | williamtrask wrote: | It's not that google can't do this. It's that the incentives | prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there's a plausible | way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel | real. | gukov wrote: | Another way to look at ChatGPT is it being a smart RSS | reader. It's the way it discards all the WordPress layout | junk giving you just the meat in a text format. | | The biggest advantage Google currently has is their massive | indexing ability. ChatGPT is oblivious to something that just | happened (ie was posted) an hour ago, a day ago, heck, a | month ago. | forrest2 wrote: | There is flywheel issue with generative search: content | producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get | paid. | | People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives | traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that | snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages | are already not appreciated by indexed websites. | | If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will | eventually see severe public info stagnation until alternative | business models can grow around it or avoid it altogether. I | suspect we'll see more platforms like Spotify for X and a | continued shift toward subscription platforms and youtube. | | Of course, what's to stop the bots from watching all of | Netflix, listening to every podcast, etc? It will be an | interesting decade for law / regulation / licensing. | EGreg wrote: | Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by | believable content generated by swarms of internet bots. | | Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it | will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine | 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on | social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running | for president. Nevermind that he wasn't born in the USA... | somehow mysteriously none of them address it: | | Yes it is here and it's already being spread but that is just | a tiny sliver of what will happen in the next 5 years: | https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg | | Such stuff can be used to move markets, pump and dump assets | and even start new wars! | WJW wrote: | What kills it for me (so far, perhaps they can fix it in the | future) is that there is no way to know if you've actually | asked ChatGPT correctly and it has given you a perfect document | with the answer you seek, or if your question was slightly off | and it has given a wrong answer, or even if your question was | correct but it still confidently gives the wrong answer. It | famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on, though | that seems to have been fixed (although that may have been just | through hardcoding). | RBerenguel wrote: | Or you have asked correctly (or not, that's hard to tell from | the onset) and has given you a non-factual answer. For | example, I asked ChatGPT for what would be the best | introductory book for a subject (added some more conditions | to make it pretty clear-cut). It recommended me a book that | sounded reasonable in title, with existing authors in the | field... but the book didn't exist, at all. | boredemployee wrote: | Yes. It can even give name of research papers that never | existed | dpkirchner wrote: | I wish ChatGPT would give you the score(s) of the results it | returns, so you could understand how correct it "thinks" the | response is. I wonder if those confidently wrong answers are | also low scoring. | geoffreypoirier wrote: | I had a long requirements chat last night and did just | that: | | There are many self-hosted solutions that could potentially | meet the requirements you have listed for your RSS | aggregator and reader project. Here is a list of some | popular options, ranked in order of their approximate | percentage of compatibility with the features you have | specified: | | RSS Aggregator | | | Percentage Score | URL | | | | --- | --- | | | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ | | | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ | | | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ | | | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | | | RSS Reader | | | Percentage Score | URL | | | | --- | --- | | | | 90% | https://tt-rss.org/ | | | | 85% | https://miniflux.app/ | | | | 80% | https://newsboat.org/ | | | | 75% | https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters | | | | 70% | https://github.com/noahcoad/feeds | | | | 65% | https://github.com/ssut/py-googlenews | | | | 60% | https://git.gnome.org/browse/feedreader/ | | | Please note that these percentages are approximate and are | intended only as a rough guide. You may want to consider | other factors such as the user interface, performance, | security, and integration with other tools when choosing a | solution for your project. | permo-w wrote: | you could probably ask it | dpkirchner wrote: | I'd considered that -- in some cases it says it's | absolutely confident, like with basic arithmetic, and in | others it says: | | > Without more information, I cannot estimate the | accuracy or reliability of these claims. It is important | to note that there may be conflicting or inaccurate | information available online, and it is always a good | idea to verify information from multiple sources before | accepting it as fact. | | which seems pretty reasonable. | krisoft wrote: | > It famously asserted numbers like 42 were prime early on | | Oh it tried to convince me that four is not larger than one. | :) It went like this: | | At first I asked ChatGPT to summarise J.C. Owen's | contribution to geometric constraint solving. It gave me an | answer which might be even correct. It sounded correct | anyway. Then I have asked for a worked example of his method | used on a toy geometric constraint system. It run into | problems with that. Chiefly that the system is selected was | under constrained. | | When I asked about that it insisted that it is well | constrained. It even volunteared the info that for a system | to be well constrained it needs as many variables as | constraint equations. Then it told me that the system it | generated has 4 variables and 1 equation. | | As a last question I asked if "Is four larger than 1?" and it | resolved the seeming contradiction by telling me that in the | context of geometric constraint solving four is not larger | than one. One does learn a new thing every day. :) | anothernewdude wrote: | I'll take the links many times over a generated document. | | I can't buy from a storefront generated by ChatGPT. I can't | cite a document written by ChatGPT, I can't trust news | generated by ChatGPT, I can't comment on a forum generated by | ChatGPT, I can't watch videos that ChatGPT describes, the | recipes ChatGPT creates may not be possible to cook, and will | probably still contain a fake life story before it. | krisoft wrote: | Yeah, it is so obviously a usefull user interface pattern. The | real question is if it can be made accurate. | | I have asked chatGPT about my boss (a well published | researcher) and it managed to summarise his work quite well, | name the field he has worked in and even write about some of | his previous projects. It also insisted on that he is already | dead. Which made it very funny when I have shown it to him. :) | | But funny doesn't win one a trophy in information retrieval. | Clearly it knows a lot about a lot of things, but the accuracy | is hit and miss. Can this be fixed? Then this is the future. If | it can't, because this is a fundamental property of these | systems then it won't be a usefull replacement of search. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-25 23:00 UTC)