devils advocate, but Google wasn’t designed to make sure the links it aggregates at the top are accurate/isn’t just blog spam designed to cater to specialized SEO tricks
In my experience the detoriation came after the change in leadership.
Undoubtedly he came off as clever, but being a harasser means that his achievements were outweighed by the benefits.
"he's a harasser => he must be a parasite on the organization"
because then you end up with
"he's provably an excellent worker and hugely productive => he can't be a harasser, you're mistaken/lying"
Some people are really smart and productive and a credit to their profession and also awful to women and/or minorities, and you'd never know if you didn't witness/experience it.
But if they are awful only to white straight males, they are ok?
Harassment is harassment, stealing someone's work is stealing someone's work, let's keep changing the meaning of words to politicians.
But at the very least Google always gives you the source, which allows you to read it for yourself and judge its trustworthiness. No such option for ChatGPT.
Are we using the same search engine? I use DuckDuckGo most of the time but Google is hardly terrible, even if it could be improved.
I find what I’m looking for in the top results 90-95% of the time. The other 5-10% also contains times where there simply isn’t a good link that solves what I’m looking for even after digging hard.
Then you are not using the same engine!
(I also use DDG and find its results superior to google).
It's like how Twitter's default feed changed to try to tell you what you wanted to see, while the old chronological feed was the content you originally asked to follow. The simpler feed was always better and less contentious for non-newbie/casual users.
Google is better at deciphering what you want, but DDG is straight up: here's the simplest results based on your query.
Maybe the solution is both? An evolution of the ML approach that Google uses (ala ChatGPT style mimicking a human) AND offering a tab, or box, or whatever interface, with 'simple' straightforward old-school search results. Until the former is better 99% of the time, they shouldn't abandon the latter.
1) Not be the actual source of content 2) Not link to the original source
If Microsoft somehow is able to implement the information synthesis (e.g. "give me an example of C++ metaprogramming, using Boost Hana") with actual indexed links from sources, that would probably be the one thing I'd see in the near-ish term that could upset the search engine balance of power.
I would be really curious to see how trying to learn a new subject via a chatbot that is able to also provide source material links would go.
But an LLM doesn’t look at particular sources, find relevant ones, and write a response based on them, it is a mathematical summation of the way all of its sources look as sequences of text, and produces a response that based on that fits with its prompt. Identifying which sources most influence a response isn’t merely something that they don’t currently do, its information that, AFAIK, there is no plausible way to recover from the model.
A good chunk of the remainder of the times I click through - especially on work-related stuff - it turns out the page is some kind of cribbed content from GitHub, StackOverflow and so forth, but mangled together and reskinned with different randomly-generated usernames making the "comments", so it seems like it's a different site, and you can only really tell by picking a specific sentence that appears unique and then manually searching for that same sentence on several different sites. No clear source there either.
Web search is broken, and it has been for several years now.
Excellent: this quite quickly tells you that the search result was wrong. So you quickly got very relevant context and can tell at a glance that there is no source. You don't get any such context when GPT provides an invalid answer.