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Comment by bg24 | Hacker News Reader

My concern is about this whole business model of adding ChatGPT to a search engine. A search engine is a free tool. Because it is free, the incentive to make money is via ads, referral etc. That means preferential treatment where the money is.

ChatGPT (or a similar product) focuses on solving users problem interactively. No ads, no going to another website etc. How would you make money from a search engine?

I was hoping a simple, paid model to start with. Over time, as the LLMs become commodity (200GB, runnable on Intel/AMD), ship it as part of the OS and other devices.

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> solving users problem interactively. No ads, no going to another website etc

I think there is no technical barrier to add Ads to a chat bot. It's even more deceptive when promotion campaigns are embbeded into text contexts implicitly. It would be much more dangerous and harder to block than, let's say a DIV on a webpage.

The same goes for regular ads. Before Google, search engines injected ads as regular search results, not informing users of the practice.

What prevents search engines from doing this nowadays is culture and law, not technical aspects.

Interesting. I did not think of it. Agree that there is no technical barrier.

Two giants are facing off so the logic is probably something like:

Microsoft makes money from services so it doesn't have to make money from a search engine.

Google, on the other hand, makes money from ads so it doesn't have to make money from services.

If Microsoft can take Google's ad revenue away they no longer have to compete against Google's free services.

The converse also holds but it may be easier for Microsoft to weaken Google.

You realize google probably has a 10x better AI then ChatGPT. They just arn’t publicizing it. Google has all the data. It's not even a competition. If bing adds it then google will simply add a better version of it.

Paid search exists; I recently signed up for Kagi[1], and it's more or less fine. Might make a good candidate for integration there, eh?

1 https://kagi.com/

There’s actually a similar feature in testing: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/contextai?question=explain+quantum+...

It’s not ChatGPT as they judged that too low quality (with the lying and everything) and instead something that actually gives sources.

I have not used it yet, so I don’t know what the quality is.

Wow, nice one. I tried with a few queries, and it is better than both google and chat-gpt. Pinned as a tab and will play more with it :)

Just remember that Kagi is a paid search engine, so I’m not sure how long this will stay public, I did not actually know that it was public :D

If not ChatGPT, do you know what it is using?

It's actually a mix of GPT3 (the one with an API available) and web results.

I used paid brave search, but they plan to associate with google (beta)... So I still don'tknow about them.

Correction: it goggle (beta), not google (beta).

Are you by any chance referring to Goggles (with two 'g's) which is indeed a beta feature, but has nothing to do with Google? https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover

(Disclaimer: I work at Brave)

My bad...

I just checked...

I'm confused.

I see a lot of people saying this, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

As your conversation evolves with the bot, targeted ads could be shown with the same (or better) level of intent data available based on the human’s input.

> As your conversation evolves with the bot, targeted ads could be shown

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords: https://future.attejuvonen.fi/

With the improved text embedding model, this is both doable right now and almost certainly more informative than a single text query string.

“Hey bing whats a good graphics card?”

Links to cards mentioned in the summary.

… now you can make money on the links directly, perhaps have sponsorships influence the recommendations, and have a strong signal of intent to purchase you can try to monetize later.

“Hey bing what’s a good hotel in downtown Montreal?” -> same

Easy. Train LLM to make subtle recommendations for sponsored products.

I’m joking of course but somebody is going to this

I would be somewhat wary of this idea. Because bots like ChatGPT will oversell and it is kinda creep.

Current search ads display options and let you filter through which is neat, but ChatGPT like agent will shred the original content and make it invisible to distinguish which is ads, and worse false advertising, which is not.

I think let ChatGPT to infer the attribution automatically and do a revenue sharing with original link owner will be a better option.

> I’m joking of course but somebody is going to this

Already done :)

https://future.attejuvonen.fi/

With LLMs you can weave ads seamlessly into the answers, by injecting the right prompts

"How do I secure my repo from exposing secrets?"

Your repository can be secured by enterprise grade post-modern Security-as-Code(tm) frameworks pioneered by SaCicorp(R) backed by YC '24-27 and other leading partners that enforces an indomitable security posture in any threat landscape.

"Wow!! What is that?"

regular expression

They need to clearly mark the ads and they can be skipped with AdBlock rules then.

They could state "Some of the content in the following paragraph is sponsored by Apple:" and then weave it in. Edit: but still have vital content in the paragraph, like product placement in movies.

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