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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

I just don't want to search the web. I have questions and I want answers- searching the web is an intermediate step, not the end solution.

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.

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Sometimes, often, I really just want to search the web. I just want to see what's out there! I have some vague ideas that I am trying to make more coherent and give sharper edges too, and I'm exploring the space those ideas fit into to see what others have done with them. Often I don't have a specific question in mind, and trying to frame my query as a coherent question will be limiting.

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.

Arguably Google has been taking your agency away and predicting your intent for the last decade at a minimum. The only difference here seems to be that you’re noticing it.

This is why I don't use Google since a long time ago.

You're not wrong in terms of the average user's intent (they mostly don't care about the source, they care about the content), but I see this as an ethical gray area when search engines effectively offer up all this content created by bloggers without the need of the user to visit the site itself.

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.

If you talk to a collegue and say "what should I use to do X", and they say "use FooX", because they read it in a book last year, is that unethical?

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.

At this point, anybody here likely has had the privilege of being educated to prefer primary sources of information over secondary, tertiary, etc.

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”

Search is pretty horrible these days imo.

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.

Go try to ask any of these hosted LLM bots about sexual topics to find out how far from objectivity we are. I earned a stern warning after trying to write a dirty pun with ChatGPT

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.

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