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Comment by Karawebnetwork | Hacker News Reader

Perplexity https://www.perplexity.ai/ does it well in my opinion.

It builds a paragraph answering your query but it has a lot of footnotes that link directly to websites.

Ex:

"geopolitical reason for palm oil being banned and why it's bad for health"

The EU has banned palm oil in biofuels due to its negative impacts on health[1] and its geopolitical implications, such as favoring alternative crops grown in Europe[2]. Palm plantations are also a major factor of deforestation[3], leading to the loss of habitat for endangered species[4]. Indonesia's President Joko Widodo recently announced a ban on the export of palm oil, which could backfire due to its importance in the global market[5].

1nih.gov 2weforum.org 3theconversation.com 4triplepundit.com 5carnegieendowment.org

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just wondering aloud, but say like this eats google's lunch and search goes away. These chatbots provide answers, and footnotes. In a world like this, where the need is reduced to actually go to a website, what's the incentive for maintaining a website that no one visits? After a couple rounds of "adversarial training data evolution," that is, people optimizing their websites to get mentions by chatbots, will the bots really be better than google? After a couple routes of revenue improvements, will the chatbot responses remain good? And if folks quit maintaining websites, do the chatbots get a bit stuck in time from when their training data was last good?

I feel like there is something here, but I wonder if second order effects make it trickier than it appears atm

It's the dying out of the "middle" of the value curve. You end up with a market that's dominated by cheap "good enough" products for casuals and "products built to last" for power users.

So if you have a low effort website that's factual and text based, you're going to get your lunch eaten by GPT, if you have a higher effort website (subscription gated with lots of multimedia content and user engagement) you'll be fine.

Think of all the blogspam recipe sites that are going to run into trouble when ChatGPT learns to cook well. Lots of text, little additional value, no community. There still will be America's Test Kitchen because people on the upper end of the value curve don't just want a recipe, they want pictures + video of that recipe being made and a place where they can ask questions and get answers.

> In a world like this, where the need is reduced to actually go to a website, what's the incentive for maintaining a website that no one visits?

I guess to get the bots to tell your lies.

A link is useless if you can't verify it. Just linking to the "nih.gov" homepage is meaningless, I have no ability to click through and verify that "ah yes, this page does demonstrate the claim being made." The system could just link to arbitrary homepages of respected institutions and claim that they back up whatever is being said.

The displayed text is the home site, but the link itself is to a relevant specific page. Also clicking "view list" expands and shows excerpts from each page.

They seem to link to the inner page where they found data to generate that inference.

Like for me, it gave be a footnote to this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/109h24i/gpt_4_is_co...

When I asked about chatGPT.

The links are actual pages not just the homepage. "nih.gov" is just the link title.

Apologies, I had a hard time copy/pasting the footnotes as on the website they are css styled boxes with a thumbnail. This is only the label, the link itself brings the the relevant pages.

> Perplexity does it well in my opinion.

Nope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685862

I only meant about the use of footnotes links. The AI themselves are quite bad but can also be useful if you learn not to take everything at face value. One example of it failing is when I search for my own name it mixes up a bunch of people together so I end up being a dead murderer from the 70's, a house rental person, a developer and also a pianist.

Footnote links still don't solve the financial model, primarily because nobody clicks on them.

There was congressional testimony by the founder/owner of "Celebrity Net Worth" about how Google made it impossible for them to stay in business. Whenever somebody would search "How much is <celebrity X> worth?", the answer would just show up directly on the Google results page. There was still an attribution link to Celebrity Net Worth, but nobody ever clicked on it anymore, so the result was Celebrity Net Worth had to shut down.

You can certainly argue fairly whether sites like CNW deserve to exist in the first place, but it's not hard to see how there is still a huge financial problem when ALL the ad revenue goes to the search engines and they don't even leave any of the slim scraps to the publisher sites.

But if I have info I need why would I visit links in footnotes

The same reason there are sources in the footnotes on Wikipedia: so you can double check or read further.

I like to think of ChatGPT and the like as an on-demand personalized Wikipedia: a good starting point, comes with strings attached, not always correct (but some are fine with it).

ChatGPT doesn't link sources yet but I saw that the beta test context search from Kagi had them.

because ChatGPT loves to make up some “facts” in authoritative tone?

Great share thank you. And i hope this becomes mainstream. The citations provide a hierarchy of authenticity to the web.

One of the best AI + search implementations ever

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