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Comment by NGRhodes | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this.

I like the integration and the helpfulness, reminds me of the ships computer off the Enterprise in Star Trek in that it can be very useful for collecting information to help learn and make decisions.

Things I don't like: This adds a layer between content creators and the user, its opaque, we don't know what filtering, censoring is happening, how accurate the information is that is being derived, how laws are being interpreted, how legal, untested gray areas are handled.

Also how are the content creators going be compensated, I think this could lead to more and more content being put behind barriers to help protect income and IP.

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I think it's a continuation of what's been happening for years on Google search result pages:

- At the top of the page, everyone is familiar with the massive infoboxes that summarize the query and often push to other Google properties rather than the source.

- The actual web results in the middle of the page are often trash due to high ad load, SEO blog spam, etc. And of course you are only seeing the output of a filtered/censored ranking system.

- They're even taking over the bottom of the page too, at least on mobile. If I search for "San Francisco", after scrolling a bit I get into an infinite scroll of other suggested queries, like "hotels in San Francisco".

Google made the decision to heavily bias and editorialize their search results a long time ago, but it's turned into a frankenstein because to some extent it still masquerades as what it used to be. The chat interface might be a good way to cut through that charade and get to the point more directly.

So like search?

Search used to be quite neutral, except for page rank. “List all web pages in your index that contain the following words/phrases.”

This seems to be aiming to be an "answer engine".

That's a very different thing than a search engine. My fear is that search engines will atrophy or go away, and I will have lost very important functionality.

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