> The concern I have with LLMs replacing search is that once it starts being monetized with ads or propaganda, it's going to be very dangerous.

Not to mention that users consuming most content through a middle-man completely breaks most publishers business models. Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.

Expect to see a lot more technical countermeasures and/or lawsuits against LLM search engines that regurgitate so much material that they effectively replace the need to visit the original publisher.

“Fuck you, pay me” - Childish Gambino

The whole thing needs a reframe. Ad driven business only works because its a race to the bottom. Now we are approaching the bottom, and its not gonna be as competitive. Throwback to the 90s when you paid for a search engine?

If you can charge the user (the customer- NOT the product) and then pay bespoke data providers (of which publishers fall under) then the model makes more sense, and LLM providers are normal middlemen, not parasites.

The shift is already underway imo - my age cohort (28 y/o) does not consume traditional publications directly. Its all through summarization like podcast interviews, youtube essays, social media (reddit) etc

"Fuck you, pay me" - Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990)

:-)

I think something as important as accurate and quick search should be definitely something that people are willing to spend on. $20 / month for something like that seems absolutely a no brainer, and it should for everyone in my view.

People already spent upwards of $50 a month for the internet itself, plus they probably pay monthly for one or more streaming services. They likely pay separately for mobile data too.

Separate monthly fees for separate services is absolutely unsustainable already. The economic model to make the internet work has not yet been discovered, but $20 a month for a search engine is not it.

For me the ideal would be some form of single subscription - I'm fine with $100 / month, where whatever I use is proportionally tracked and the services I use are ad-free, orientated to bring me the content I absolutely want and nothing else. Depending on usage of all of those is how the $100 would be spread among them.

I totally agree this payment pattern would work. I think the technical implementation is pretty straightforward but getting enough writers and artists to join would be difficult.

Don't you think the bigger problem is the statistically insignificant number of people that could actually afford such a model?

Not really. Everyone is paying monthly anyways it can just be a part of that or a surcharge on top. And I don't envision this being a mastodon thing but a "serious writing/news/art" kind of thing. Alteady there is a lot more asking of direct support online than twenty years ago. KoFi, medium subscriptions etc. I think people are open to the idea of direct sponsorship of creative people they like. The product space is there we just need good infra.

That’s a nice idea, but the entire world is used to getting their internet content for free by now. People who are willing to pay anything for websites are a tiny minority.

How do you get these high amounts for the internet? In my country (EU) 600Mbps costs below $15 and I know that's not the most popular fee level. $100 or even $50 on the internet only (not counting video subscriptions) sounds like something too high for the vast majority around me.

I pay for Kagi, and apparently so do many others here on HN. This, however, solves only half of the problem - publishers are not on board with the scheme, so they still output impression-optimized "content". But at least the search engine isn't working against my interests.

Yes, I also don't understand how LLM based compaines expect people to keep producing contect for them for free.

I think they're gonna have to pay.

The way reddit limited access to their API and got google to pay for access. Some variation of that but on a wider scale.

But that breaks OpenAI’s (et al) entire business model. Those AI companies can barely afford to operate as it is, while they scrape the entire web for free. I don’t see how they could keep above water once every website starts paywalling their stuff.

Is it the training or running costs that are putting them in debt? Presumably we'll eventually get to a point where the models are good and they can train less and charge enough to turn a profit. Maybe then they can do a revshare with content creators. Maybe something like YouTube

They'll have to figure it out because people aren't gonna write content just for openai to scrape it, the economics don't work.

> Traditional search is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but LLM search is parasitic.

Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement".

If anything, that arrangement of publishers and providers became an actual parasite on society at large these days. Publishers, in particular, will keep whining about being cut off; I have zero sympathy - people reach for LLMs precisely because publishers have been publishing trash and poison, entirely intentionally, optimizing for the parasitic business model, and it got so bad that the major use of LLMs is wading through that sea of bullshit, so that we don't have to.

The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.

(Unfortunately, LLMs will work only for a short while, they're very much vulnerable to capture by advertisers - which means also by those publishers who now theatrically whine.)

OK, but someone still has to publish the subset of good content that the LLMs slurp up and republish. LLMs still need fresh quality content from somewhere.

They're getting it by paying contractors at Scale AI to write content for them.

> They're getting it by paying contractors at Scale AI to write content for them.

Just a wild guess, but at best that content is probably pretty mediocre quality. It's probably Mikkelsen Twins ebook-level garbage.

Not anymore. There's arguably more than enough data to form a base for strong LLMs; extra data is nice, but doesn't have to come in such quantity.

(In fact, there's value in trying to filter excess crap out of existing training sets.)

We're talking about LLM-driven search engines here, the assumption is that they will always need up-to-date information. A "strong LLM" can't give you to latest on the presidential election if its knowledge cut-off is in 2023, so these companies "solution" is to scrape today's New York Times and get the LLM to write a summary.

You still need fresh data for many use cases.

Uh, sorry what?

What happens when you need to search something new? Just hallucinations all the way down?

LLMs arent embodied. They can not break news as they have no ability to gather fresh news

For all the hate it gets, Brave solved this half a decade ago already.

- Publishers no longer show you ads, they just get paid out of BAT.

- Brave shows you ads, but Brave does not depend on that to survive. Because of that there is no weird conflict of interest like with Google/Facebook, where the party that surfaces your content is also the party providing you with ads.

- Users can just browse the web without ads as a threat vector, but as long as you have BAT (either via opt-in Brave ads or by purchasing it directly) you are not a freeloader either.

The crypto part of brave is the worst part of brave..

How is it the worst part?

You opt-in to the ads, you get them in your notifications, and every time you tap on one of them you get a few BAT. You browse, the BAT get paid out to whichever sites you visit (or linger on, depending on your configuration). You can opt out of the ads at any time. Brave didn't pre-mine their own coins. And you can buy BAT if you want to support sites without watching ads.

> Brave solved this ... Brave shows you ads

Showing people ads is part of the problem to be solved.

It is solved. You can pay Brave to not be shown ads.

And the website gets paid either way.

How else are you going to pay the people writing articles, creating content and doing research?

Not every person/site can run on Patreon or sponsorship deals. And paywalling a lot of the web would exclude vast swathes of people.

1. With ads, I don't pay people writing articles, creating content or doing research.

2. "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.

3. The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.

> With ads, I don't pay people writing articles, creating content or doing research.

You do. The ad broker sells access to your eyeballs to a company, and then gives part of that money to whichever parties have a monetization agreement in the content.

> "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.

Always fun to see people with strong opinions be critically misinformed.

Brave’s ads don’t have tracking, by design.

> The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.

By that logic we should stop paying for art?

People who have something meaningful to say usually do it anyway.

The others can shut up.

Research is usually not paid by ads.

Some of the best scientists did it for fun. Einstein wrote his 1905 papers while working at the swiss patent office.

Probably no one here is trying to profit by their additions to the discussion, but they’re still regularly sharing very useful information.

I don't think I'd publish on a blog if I knew it would be consumed entirely from an LLM. Even if I don't want money, I kind of want people to know that I wrote it, they're my ideas, and I don't want them taken out of context.

From the look of the examples they use at least sites like TripAdvisor, which I'd assume would like to have people go to their site.

For services like rail companies, restaurants and so on, I can see them not being bothered, because they make their money offline. Blogs, and pure content sites might not be to happy about their content being used to prop up OpenAIs business, while getting nothing in return. If anything it seems like OpenAI is actively trying to get sued.

The whole interface and functionality seems really nice and a clear improvement for the users, for certain types of queries at least. It assumes that OpenAI has made their LLM stop lying, and that they can get the required data legally, but it doesn't seem like anyone cares about those details.

Something has to die, so that something new can live

But if the data provides die, so that LLMs may live, where will the LLMs get new data?

From other LLMs of course.

Which is the main issue I see with them, if no one publishes anything new, all you will get is whatever was there before, which may be incorrect or obsolete. If you want something new, an LLM can't discover it if no data source exists. So over time the LLM becomes useless for current information.

> Traditional search is mutually beneficial... to search providers and publishers. At expense of the users. LLM search is becoming popular because it lets users, for however short time this will last, escape the fruits of the "mutually beneficial arrangement".

Out of the pot and into the fire, as they say.

> At expense of the users.

Bullshit. Users have shown time and time and time again that they prefer (generally, at large) free content, which has to be supported by ads, over actually paying directly for the labor of others.

> The ad-driven business model of publishing has been a disaster for a society, and deserves to be burned down completely.

I tend to agree, but people can't expect content, which needs sizable amounts of time and money to produce, for free - it needs some sort of workable funding model. LLMs are only viable now because they were able to slurp up all that ad-supported content before they broke the funding model. That window is closing, and fast.

This in absolute spades, and I wish there was a way to elevate comments to top-level posts sanely.

But yes: the original Web served its (non-profit-motivated) creators and readers. The past two decades of advertising-based web has served publishers and advertisers, precisely as you note. LLM is mixing that up for the moment but I sincerely doubt that it will last.

That said, I welcome the coming ad/pub pain with unbridled glee.

> Search is pretty much dead to me.

I've heard reports that requesting verbatim results via the tbs=li:1 parameter has helped some people postpone entirely giving up on Google.

Personally I've already been on Kagi for a while and am not planning on ever needing to go back.

Fuzzy search is cancer. I search for $FOO, click a result, Ctrl-F for $FOO ==> Not found. Many such cases. If there's a way to force DuckDuckGo to actually do what I tell it to, I'd love to hear it.

I thought this problem will disappear upon switching to Kagi, but it suffers from the same disease, albeit to a lesser extent.

I remember reading a Google Search engineer on here explain that the engine just latches on some unrendered text in the HTML code. For example: hidden navbars, prefetch, sitemaps.

I was kinda shocked that Google themselves, having infinite resources, couldn't get the engine to realize which sections gets rendered... so that might have been a good excuse.

Try searching for "$FOO", that's what I usually do in those cases. See https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/

Also, energy use: 10x as much as a Google search https://www.rwdigital.ca/blog/how-much-energy-do-google-sear....

It's not that signifigant if you compare the average person's energy use from internet searches, versus something like air conditioning

I doubt air conditioning is as used as internet search engines. The only places where I ever saw air climatisation is cars and business buildings. I never saw one in a personal home, let alone a personal device carried in the pocket you can use while walking.

You’ve never seen a first world house with central air?

This is regional. Air conditioning is not at all common in Scandinavian homes.

GP must live in the UK or India. Well, actually, some homes in India do have A/C.

I live in Strasbourg, France.

Doesn't France have extreme heat waves in summer?

The way temperatures have been changing in Europe in the past decade, you may not have A/C at home now, but I bet you'll have it in ten years, tops. So will everyone else and their dogs.

Yes we have pick heat waves. But that didn't make magically expand incomes that can be dropped in AC installation and operational costs.

As I said, in building that are attached to money incomes, be it hostels, shops or restaurants, it's of course something that can balanced within loses and profits. In a personal home, it will be just eat some of your budget.

And with electricity price on the rise (and thus basically everything in common goods) and salary stagnation on the other hand, I doubt people here will suddenly rush on AC on massive scales. Plus government apparently are pushing to alternative approach, but I'm just discovering that as this thread launched me on the track to investigate the topic.

Personally, I doubt I'll jump to some AC anytime soon. It's just out of reach for my incomes, all the more when there is no basically no chance to see the electricity price plummet while my salary has good chances to continue to stay freezed as it's been for the two last years. And it's not like I feel the most unlucky person in the town, to be clear, my situation is far from the worst ones I can witness around me.

Where I live (Poland), A/C is expensive too, though it's been dropping in price. Portable heat pumps are becoming cheap enough to consider. Fixed installations are doable even in individual flats (obviously cheapest when during general renovation, and boring extra holes in walls isn't a big deal). The last few years made people switch from thinking about A/C as a luxury for the rich, and start thinking about maybe getting it some day. And our heat waves were quite light compared to the rest of Europe.

most people in Western Europe don't have A/C, houses are way better insulated for short-term heatwaves and people usually don't mind indoor temperatures of up to 80-84F/26-28C. If you add the general hate French (and I think German?) people have for drafts and air currents in general and you can see how people just deal with the heat in the summer.

Not to mention central A/C in the North American sense with a air handler & ducts is just never coming to France, it's such an outdated technology and forced-air heating is generally considered to suck there.

Hmm. Two years ago I was at the Louvre in May. I know Paris is very proud it doesn’t use AC but only “chilled” water from the Seine. Well with thousands of bodies, it was HOT. I was dripping wet from sweat and I was not the only one. I read that 15k people died in France during the 2003 heatwave. I find the slow adoption of AC disappointing as I am usually a Francophile. https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230717-parisians-a...

I understand the Olympic Village had the same system and many teams brought their own portable AC units. https://apnews.com/article/olympics-air-conditioning-paris-0...

Most people who died in 2003 as a consequence of the heat where old people who laked enough care and dedicated resources. Lake of AC was maybe not a helper here, but there is more at play than just that.

That population is the most vulnerable, and indicative of the issue. The heat indeed killed them, but the availability/affordability of AC could have saved lives.

Interesting, thank you.

I suppose that you do have heating in the home?

Yes, actually we finally found a house that was affordable for us last year, and made lot work in it, including wall isolation, changing windows, and install a heat pump, replacing the oil-for hearing system that was in place. Heat pumps are clearly on the rise around here, contrary to AC. There is of course no magic regarding electricity price here, but oil provision and prices are also big unknowns, all the more with the state pushing oil-fire systems out of market as a legal option.

Forced-air heating basically does not exist in France :). To be fair, radient heating is always a nicer experience.

No. Not a single time I can remember in 40 years of existence living in Europe.

Shops, restaurants, airports and things like that which are attached with revenue streams have them.

I never been in a billionaire palace thus said.

Not billionaires or even millionaires. This is normal for a middle-class home in Canada and US at least. It's not that expensive to run and those who are tight on cash just run it less, only on really hot days.

You really need to broaden your horizons while you still have the chance. This is like believing that boats don't exist because you live inland and have never seen a boat. Hundreds of millions of people are dependent on air conditioning in their homes.

I'm not sure what you mean with dependent here.

I never said that boats or AC don't exist. Both exist, and I did saw and experimented many of them in commercial context. But not everyone can afford them plus the cost to operate them.

Sure I should broaden my horizon and even consider to look people enjoying their private jets and some helicopters. But a mere wage slave like myself will never have the chance to afford one, that's for sure.

Now let's consider back in initial context: mere mortals around me are definitely all using internet as soon as there parents will let them do so, and even a homeless person can afford a first price mobile access (2€/months) with a phone they can receive for nothing in some charity organizations like Emmaus. So affordability of access to online search is definitely several order below AC.

Dependent means it would not be physically possible to live in an area if it did not have air conditioning. For example, you would die very quickly in Phoenix, Arizona if you did not have air conditioning. It is not physically possible to live in 50°C heat for any extended period. Most of the southern portion of the USA was only sparsely settled until the invention and deployment of air conditioning. Krugman is on it.

https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0...

https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0...

The reason the city is called Phoenix in the first place is that it’s built on top of a much older community. People have lived (and kept cool!) in that area for thousands of years, although never with the current level of population density, of course.

Air conditioning is not an extravagant luxury, although I know many people who live in cold countries believe so. That's why I'm asking you to broaden your horizons. You don't consider indoor heating or plumbing a luxury to be comparable to a private jet?

In hot and humid places, having AC was always a priority a hundred steps above having internet access, until cheap smart phones arrived.

And they use a lot of energy, just like heating uses a lot of energy in colder climates.

Well, indoor heating is clearly more and more becoming a luxury on the affordability side, enough so that putting a jacket inside is my first go to option when I'm alone at home as I work remotely. But not yet so excited expensive as to private my children from its been benefits when they come back home. And of course nothing like a jet, indeed.

Plumbing is generally not also considered a luxury over here. But at mankind level, I do feel particularly privileged on this regard. I remain amazed we have water flowing at will, and even possibility to take hot shower every day. This is not a jet level kind of privilege, but I try to keep myself aware of how incredibly lucky I am to be able to benefit of such a technology and infrastructure.

I doubt humans waited AC to come alive for settling hot and humid areas. There are other ways to have cooled down residences which don't require so much sophistication in physic models before you can even dream to build a prototype.

All that said, I got your hint to document more on how/why AC is so much more used in some area, and I'm just starting my journey on learning about it.

I still doubt that local climate alone explain the difference in term of how common it is in different region of the world. For example USA have a very large set of different local climate, but from what I understand most homes have AC.

I would say that there are no other way besides AC to cool down residences. Only building something akin to a palace with thick stone walls. But naturally, everybody cannot live in a palace. What people did before AC was invented, is to go to the river for a bath to cool down. And if you are unfortunate to not have AC in a place were you'd need it, you'll have to take a lot of showers, and drink a lot of cold water (but fridges are AC technology).

But I don't think anybody should consider themselves lucky to have AC or heating or plumbing. We're in the 21st century, these should be granted. We've moved beyond the phase of bare survival.

If you consider Northern European countries, human survival would have been near impossible there without artificial heating in the form of fire. You could say that thick fur clothes and a protein and fat heavy diet is enough, but you still need to dry your clothes somehow if it's been pouring 0 degree rain for a month straight. On the other hand, eskimos seem to have found a better technique, but I think their advantage is that they live so far North that they don't have to worry about cold rain: https://time.com/archive/6798620/science-the-cozy-eskimo/

The cool thing (hehe) with AC that few people think about is that it actually conditions the air. It's not just an air cooler, but more importantly it removes air humidity. Humidity is much more important than temperature. For example, a day with 32℃ temperature and 45% humidity will not feel too hot. You can sit in the shadow and be comfortable. But a day with 27℃ temperature and 80% humidity will be suffocatingly hot. I'm not sure why, I think it has to do with how we sweat. Or maybe that heat is conducted from the air to our bodies more efficiently in higher humidity.

If you have any suggestion for a cheaper solution than AC for keeping cool at home, I would be happy to hear. The noise of the machine can be annoying at night.

I'd like to give you a tip for reducing your heating bill there in France: Electric bed sheet/blanket. I have been using these for a decade now (where I live it gets both hot and cold). They keep you warm and comfortable all night and they use almost no electricity. I even believe they are beneficial for your health, but I cannot prove that. Been telling my European friends for years to get them, but there is great resistance. From HowStuffWorks:

"The consumption of energy depends on its wattage, typically between 15 to 115 watts. If you're based in the U.S., you might be charged around 13 cents per kWh. So, if your electric blanket consumes 100 watts and you use it for 10 hours a day, that will cost about 13 cents."

>But I don't think anybody should consider themselves lucky to have AC or heating or plumbing. We're in the 21st century, these should be granted. We've moved beyond the phase of bare survival.

I don't know what you mean with "must feel lucky" here, but on my side I do feel very privileged to live with access to these technologies. Yes, there are accessible at large scale without much people needing to struggle to obtain it, but this is not really a reason to not feel deeply grateful each time we are given the opportunity to enjoy them.

This week in Spain terrible floods ruined life of many people. While there is no doubt that many other things are coming to them as awful consequences, there is little doubt that not being able to enjoy these commodities makes it even harder.

If humanity could achieve worldwide dynamics for a few centuries without starvation at scale, genocide, large scale catastrophe significantly induced by insane urbanistic choices through careless or corrupted decision processes, and of course war, then maybe could take factually say that we "moved beyond the phase of bare survival" is a general baseline that can be taken for granted, rather than the brittle situation in which the most lucky people live in.

Regarding electric blanket, I don't see the point. During night, I generally sleep nude, and without heating the bedroom. As pointed by the reference you gave on Eskimos, keeping the body generated heat is generally more than enough to be confortable. Heating a room is only something that provides the sweet pleasure of being confortable without a jacket while moving around within the house.

In Croatia more than 55% of households have AC installed, and only 10 years ago it was less than 25% of households. It got more popular as our summers are getting increasingly more hot and humid. Average salaries in France are probably double compared to Croatia. It definitely can't be classified as luxury if more than half of the country can afford it, in one of the poorer EU member states. I assume in the next 10 years it's probably gonna be 70+% of all households.

Regarding technical sophistication, AC is more or less using the same technology as a fridge, just scaled and adapted for room cooling instead of food storage.

Do some research on the American south. It's hot and humid half a year+. The only reason it's so populated is AC. I'd bet there are more houses with central AC in France than there are without AC in the southern US states.

Wow, didn't expect to be downvoted on something that is so obviously aligned with what I see around me. It is a very strange feeling, very different from downvoted posts that present unpopular opinions.

It makes me look at some statistics

https://www.statista.com/statistics/911064/worldwide-air-con...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/air-condi...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52558

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20220723-france-does-not-use-mu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/vhs8dn/how_commo...

Apparently, Japan, USA and now China are huge users of AC in personal homes (like more than 90% of them). That's in sharp contrast with what is observed in most of Europe, including France where I live.

I never had the opportunity to travel to any of this country, so indeed I was totally blind of this extrem gap in use from my own personal experience.

We had window unit A/C in our very-poorly-insulated 100 year old farmhouse, when I was growing up and money was very tight, as in if we go shopping and eat out, you're getting water to drink, sharing a meal, and no dessert. Not like starvation levels of poverty but still, money was tight. A/C was not considered optional, even if you could theoretically remain alive when the temperature was over 100F every day for weeks straight and stayed in the 80s (or even 90s) at night.

Saying it's no problem to increase energy use 10x as long as something else uses more is not really a compelling argument. Especially when there are decent replacements to save the 10x item.

If I made a 10x less energy use AC I'd be a billionaire; comparing to one of the most costly energy uses that has no simple replacement is not a good metric.

You still have to consider what is worth optimizing and what is not. Getting your task done because of a superior search engine also saves total energy spent on getting that task done.

If AC did not exist and I invented it, I would also be a billionaire, energy consumption would go up, and the net effect for society would be positive. Energy consumption going up has always been a sign of improvement in human wellbeing. Why would the future be any different?

Wouldn't googles energy per search also be way up with the llm snippet at the top now?

Google doesn't use ChatGPT, and those numbers for ChatGPT (…ignoring that they're made up) don't apply. eg they use TPUs for inference not GPUs.

Google has a "site" filter.

You can suffix: "site:reddit.com" and get results for that particular site only.

They even broke this for me (in a way) because for some inexplicable reason Google blocks text replacement on Mac in their search.

Yes there are workarounds, but I like using the native OS text expansion and it works everywhere except Google.

I'm curious to know if anyone sees better results by using site:reddit.com vs just appending the word reddit to your search. I've felt the results are similar.

Appending the word will occasionally get you blogspam "here's the top X of Y according to reddit". The `site:` query doesn't have that problem.

Ergh, yeah. This is a horrible but valid point

What do you mean with "when it starts"? To my mind it's obvious all LLM are heavily biased to a point it's ridiculous, all the more with the confident tone they are trained to take. I have no doubt Chinese LLM will prise the party as much as American ones will sing the gospel of neoliberal capitalism.

Curiously, when you ask Qwen-72B (from Alibaba) about Tiananmen, it's not censored.

We could have many different LLMs trained to be biased in different ways and have some form of bias checking tester, like ground news - then everyone can get their bias and live in their echo chamber.

The reason many echo chambers exist is to keep the centre of mass or barycenter from moving too fast.

Looks okay to me.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6723f225-bd74-8000-bfef-4f7f8687b0...

I agree. I quickly tried to find an other generic demand on politics and it was not so biased in the way I expected.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6724116c-13b8-8003-bb2a-4d2ca49da4...

https://chatgpt.com/share/672414aa-bcc8-8003-beec-ba4eae83a0...

I guess it matches well my own biases:'D

One person's measured response is another person's propaganda.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Some examples would help your argument.

> I think it's already compelling enough to replace the current paradigm. Search is pretty much dead to me. I have to end every search with "reddit" to get remotely useful results.

I worry that there's a confusion here--and in these debates in general--between:

1. Has the user given enough information that what they want could be found

2. Is the rest of the system set up to actually contain and deliver what they wanted

While Aunt Tillie might still have problems with #1, the reason things seem to be Going To Shit is more on #2, which is why even "power users" are complaining.

It doesn't matter how convenient #1 becomes for Aunt Tillie, it won't solve the deeper problems of slop and spam and site reputation.

Reddit is astroturfed pretty hard too nowadays. It just takes more work to spot it.

Yea, the whole "Scope your search to reddit" idea always comes up, but it just seems like a really terrible idea. How does one know for sure that the results from Reddit are any more accurate or authoritative than random SEO spam? There's very little curation or moderation there--anyone could post anything there. I could go there and comment on a subject that I have zero expertise in, make it sound confidently correct, and your reddit-scoped search might find it. Why would you trust it?

You can read whole conversations. Most of the smaller subreddits that this type of search picks up are actually filled with people passionate about whatever subject area it is. In general, I find it very trustworthy.

If you post something wrong on the Internet, someone will correct you.

I always get downvoted for this, but I much prefer Quora in my search results to Reddit for this reason. Although they've abandoned it now their earlier stringent sign-up process requiring that you are a real human means you're more likely to come across an answer with a real name and/or professional creds attached to it, and those answers imo tend to be higher quality. Of course there's all the copypasta spam (mostly) from India but that is easy to avoid since people use their real handles not anonymous sock puppets. Unfortunately they've decided to go down the route of promoting their AI chatbot in search results which for me has significantly degraded the results

Additionally, since the reddit-google deal, this only works on google anymore. I search on DDG for recent reddit content and there is nothing returned, as expected.

Google really does seem determined to completely destroy internet search.

Same here?

Search means either:

    * Stackoverlow. Damaged through new owner but the idea lives.
    * Reddit. Google tries to fuck it up with „Auto translation“?
    * Gitlab or GitHub if something needs a bugfix.

The rest of the internet is either an entire ****show or pure gold pressed latinum but hardly navigatable thanks to monopolies like Google and Microsoft.

PS: ChatGPT already declines in answer because is source is Stackoverflow? And…well…these source are humans.

I've become so complacent these last 20 years. I wonder if I try to browse the web, will I stumble upon anything as awesome as the 1998 web scene was?

For what it’s worth, sama said at a Harvard event recently that he “despised” ads and would use them at a last resort. It came across as genuine and I have the intuition/hope that they might find an alternative.

The original Google whitepaper warned against the exact moves Google made years later with ads. It's fun to go back and read their thoughts on ads and how they completely change the incentives of the search provider. "fun" in that they were right and search quality has decreased considerably because of it.

Everyone despises ads until other revenue streams run dry

I know. I thought the same. Still, part of me wants to believe that something else will come.

He also founded OpenAI as a non-profit.

I still search by default but i am starting to turn to LLMs when the search is failing and getting better answers.

For example, I couldn’t remember the word shibboleth, but an LLM was able to give me it from my description, search couldn’t.

For another example, I saw some code using a repeated set of symbols as a shorthand. I didn’t know what this does, but searching for a symbol is badly broken on Google - i just asked the LLM about the code and it gave me the answer.