Will AI answers take a large slice of the search engine pie?

Lemmingwiser

Lemmingwiser

Candyman
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Dec 15, 2022
As anyone who tried natural language AI for more than a day knows, that the answers may be confident and right sounding, they are not very reliable.

Case in point my silly question getting an incorrect answer:

Screenshot_20230310_074935_Brave.jpg

Now, search has degraded tremendously by the three powers of SEO and centralization of the internet (people clumping around a handful of sites) and censorship/curated content.

And the change at the horizon seems to be the much more computationally expensive AI search answers.

Will it actually win or is this part of machine learning a fad?
 
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Whichever one is less tampered with shall be superior.
 
I would say no but there is very little a good tech-hype can't meme into being the modus operandi.
I don't know for certain but I am pretty confident that normal searches are faster and less costly than querying the models so unless you look for information that can only be derived from multiple search results(which I think happens often enough, just not the majority of time) a normal search will just be better.
The problem is also that these models will try to square any triangle you give them, or at least I have not seen any model that can really tell you that you are, in fact, asking a stupid question.
This gets acknowledged in the realm of explainability and how dangerous it can be to have something just always do its best to create "good looking" outputs that can fool people, but a lot of work only goes into removing mean words or chasing that golden dataset that will be "unbiased".
 
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Now, search has degraded tremendously by the three powers of SEO and centralization of the internet (people clumping around a handful of sites) and censorship/curated content.
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I would not worry too much to be honest.

Google needs competition in the space, and what you are saying is, in my experience untrue. At least when it comes to SEO and centralization.

If there is no competition, bids go down, and Google makes less money. They have a very real interest in fostering a competitive market and not closing it to small companies.

On the backend, Google is actually always trying to come up with ideas to promote their services to smaller companies and individuals for this very reason, make it more accessible.

Even on the SEO side of things, they are working hard on local search and Google shopping to make it more accessible to smaller businesses, and provide them with enough visibility.

AI might change something, or more likely, it will be just like voice search, a fad.
 
ditto said:
AI will not succeed because it utterly fails at Porn, which is still like 99% of searches.
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Or more generally, any time you're searching for a specific "thing" instead of information. Porn is the big one, but also say, if the search is for a company website (too lazy to type the whole address), or for a cow across multiple social media platforms.

ditto said:
Until CoomerAI is announced Google is safe.
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CoomerAI will fail because AI can't account for fetishes, personal preferences, and previously seen content. If AI can account for those, then either it will be deemed creepy by the users or immoral by the wokes, and it will have to be lobotomized to provide less pleasing results and more HAES landwhales.

ConsoomerAI will be similarly bound by the creep factor of perfect predictions, China screaming that its racist when the bot predicts that "Made in China" results in more hesitation in purchasing, and the direct competition with the ad system.

SevenSeasAI will fail due to legal requirements rather than technological ones, piracy searches will have to be a lecture on how piracy kills puppies. No, the bot can't just filter out all the junk links, it's gotta be a moralistic lecturer.
 
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Dergint said:
Or more generally, any time you're searching for a specific "thing" instead of information. Porn is the big one, but also say, if the search is for a company website (too lazy to type the whole address), or for a cow across multiple social media platforms.
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That's a major problem with search engines right now.
 
Monuklear said:
That's a major problem with search engines right now.
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Technically yes, but it is mitigated by the fact that you are able to go beyond the first three search results and skim based on source, so there is a possibility of finding what you need if you know how to use the tool.

When AI tries to mush together multiple sources and give you a definitive answer, you can't compensate for those problems.
 
Guys you have to understand:
Right now AI is reliable cause it has information to go off. Sooner or later, all websites will be replaced with SEO for AI and most AI answers will be useless mumbo-jumbo. AI will become unreliable and no longer able to answer simple questions. Kinda like Google is now, but worse.
 
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They sure as fuck will try, and it will result in even worse search results than current Google where they will literally change your search query on the back end so they can serve you more ads.

I hate the corporations so much.
 
No, of course not. People don't want an answer, they want a right answer. How often do you not use the first result on Google? I pass on it a lot of the time and AI doesn't let you do that.
 
AI could be good at sifting through the trash google et al. give you these days for you to give you an unbiased analysis of what it found while having a much better and much more inate understanding of what you really wanted to have. Used like that, it could be the only proper way to search for anything on the internet eventually.

In order for that to work, the AI has to be local and open source though. Otherwise it's analysis will just be infused with slightly different trash by another corporation.
 
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