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Comment by _pjee | Hacker News Reader

It depends on your goal. If the focus of your search engine is question answering (like Google), ChatGPT is serious competition. Browsing the web to discover online communities and niche websites is an entirely different activity that ChatGPT doesn't compete with, and frankly Google doesn't do well either.

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Yeah discovery is in such a messy state right now. I don't think anyone is doing it well.

"Give me facts about X" there are several decent options for.

"Give me quality reading material about topic X", there's like nobody even trying. Not that an answer doesn't exist for the query, just nobody is able to produce it.

This goes well beyond websites, discovery sucks for streaming video, for shopping, almost everything.

I think one issue is broadness. When a user issues a query there is often a choice of 1) low quality material that directly answers the specific question, or 2) high quality material about the subject more broadly. If someone asks "how do I fix water in camera iphone 3", if someone has set up a content farm for that exact question Google will probably send the user there, rather than to a broader repair page from apple.com. There's tradeoffs in search ranking, which is why I think it's possible to make a search engine that takes the opposite side of the tradeoffs that Google has.

Nice job on marginalia.nu btw. Your site is a good reminder that there is a whole internet out there that just isn't able to rank on Google for various reasons.

I asked ChatGPT for webcomic recommendations and it gave me imaginary ones. No trace of them anywhere on the web.

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