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Comment by scun | Hacker News Reader

or a well-crafted static website

no, static documents are not an ideal way to find a needle in a haystack

They can be with decent search and if well organised. gov.uk works pretty well as it is and I suspect adding a chatbot would make it worse.

1. decent search, if you mean something other than what the browser provides, isn't part of a static document

2. the nature of the problem statement "needle in a haystack" suggests obstacles to traditional text search, eg. too many false positives to be helpful for natural searches and challenges to constructing more specific ones.

language models introduce new possible solutions to this ie semantic search. poorly-designed chatbots could be worse than a basic search, sure

1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.

2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.

One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".

Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.

How does the form factor of a chat bot affect the quality of a search running on a backend? It has the benefit of obviously having a semantic search affordance which a standard search field doesn't.

How about semantic embeddings for everything to facilitate search, and then don't let a bot spam sycophantic shit at me?

I'm very pro-ai, but we can improve the UI a lot sometimes, from the chat bot paradigm.

A decent search and good organization can help a more technical person find what they are looking for, but may not work well for someone with far less experience in such matters. Look at how well google returns (or at least use to) results for someone with google-fu verses someone who queried in the same fashion they would've asked a teacher or such.

A chat bot, in theory, can help enable someone who isn't as familiar with searching, doesn't know the relevant terms, or lacks a sufficient literacy level to efficiently use an otherwise well organized site. The catch is that a poorly performing chat bot can just as easily mislead such a person.

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