God damn it people. I just want to search the web. You aren't doing anything meaningful by giving me yet another fuzzy robot question machine. Just let me search the web. Queries in, web pages out.
I have Question X and the answer isn't to surface "Blog Post Y"... it's the content of Blog Post Y I need, and only the subset of the content that answers my question, perhaps synthesized with the content of 5 other blog posts, a couple scientific papers and a recent press release.
We're now in this temporary zone where "just searching the web" is still the optimal way to get answers, while search engine companies are piling into other stuff.
But very shortly that other stuff will become our go-to.
As another poster commented, don't take away my agency by trying to predict my intent! Better yet, don't try to force intent on me.
Phind tries to ameliorate this a bit by providing a set of links where the summarized data comes from, but most people likely won't even click on these links.
It's going to be rather demotivating when your site's traffic suddenly gets cut in half.
Most of the top results in search engines are terrible, mainly because of the SEO spam
We'll eventually reach that with AI of course, but for now we haven't.
The indexing feature that search engines for years provided was a side-effect and benefit of the internet’s success.
There have always been challenges with this as it is not immediately clear what should be treated as “primary source” information — it takes time and skill — the user in this model is accountable for their own exploration and consumption of other peoples’ knowledge.
AI seems to be purposefully at odds with that. So, for me, the distrust and avoidance is well-placed.
That said, it’s a powerful tool that has a place in the world, but I hope it doesn’t come at a detriment to the colloquial understanding of what it means to “search the web”
My main fear with AI becoming our go-to information retrieval platform is how can we be sure that the answer is objective truth without any slant? Shouldn't there be an ethical obligation that a model should not only fact check but also provide alternative theories? We lost that somewhere in journalism but we could regain that if we prioritized that the thinking and deciding still needs to occur human-side.
Imagine trying to do research on sexually transmitted diseases, or trying to self-educate about sex. Unfortunately the limits put in place are quite coarse today.
Pretty good! Thumbs up from me.
In fact, it's the sites peddling trivial BS that are chock to the brim with ads.
If you haven't tried Arc Search's "Browse for Me" feature, you should. It isn't perfect yet, but I think it's clear that's the direction of search in the future.
I wish these companies would focus on making their core product better instead of spending resources on AI chat interfaces.
Who's preventing you from doing that?
Complex AI for free, basic search for a fee!