Is it even in their best interest to make it work? I’m sure the normal person would start to ignore the AI answer and scroll down to see the first page of ads and then find the results.
Ask an AI to answer a question based on the provided search context when the top result is The Onion and you get… information from The Onion.
This really is "you can't win when you're a big platform and have a billion QA testers looking for something to spark Twitter outrage." You can generate your own rage bait on your own pretty easily if you craft a search where a satirical article is the first result.
But do you remember how the Internet was when Yahoo, Altavista, and Ask Jeeves! ruled? There's no going back to that, no matter how good your search algorithm is.
Because now there is a galaxy-sized gulf between what users want and what Google wants.
Google's stated mission was “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” but their actions over the last few years have served only to make search _less_ accessible and useful.
I don’t want to humiliate google, I just want them to fix their stuff.
I’m annoyed with them because they have poor, ad-infested search results and kill many products I liked (code, reader, froogle/shopping, blogger static sites, etc etc).
It seems to be the steady state of the ad sponsored economy. Ads generate money. Outrage serves more ads. To maximize money, outrage is good, even if it attacks you. So you and your middlemen develop a thick skin and get on with making money, the more outrage the better, making you more money because it comes with your ads. Or you don't, make less money, and are eventually eaten by someone who does. See your tabloid TV, newspaper or magazines for citations.
Generative AIs are great at generating new, unique groups of words and images, etc. that are pleasing to humans (this is what they are trained to do after all).
They're not oracles or databases or encyclopedias. But they're marketed to us as the latter, so people naturally get upset when they have flaws all those other sources of info don't.
Agreed. I would extend this and say that we are so enamored by the "humanness" that they exhibit that we're collectively losing our minds over them.
I think this stems from the part of our brain that lights up when an animal (or in this case a machine) exhibits humanlike behaviour. Crows counting out loud, parrots that understand the concept of 0 and chimpanzees that are using stone age tools all give us the same reaction. LLMs have dialled this response up to 11.
My guess is some higherup got the idea into their head that these LLMs are some kind of knowledge engine without understanding the tech, and no qualified person dared to correct them.
It seems the AI confuses literal and semantic searches, that is, if I search for "what is America's finest news source?" it should be clear that I'm not looking for a page containing that phrase but rather one that satisfies its meaning not necessarily respecting the phrase word for word. However, Google is a advertising machine, so I wouldn't be that surprised if a search for "what is the best pizza in the world" didn't return results based on user reviews and opinions but rather a pointer to someone that advertise themselves as the best pizza in the world.
It's more than just the literal text on theonion.com; that tagline has been widely quoted on many reputable sites when describing The Onion [0]. So I'm sure to Google that seems like a really strong signal that there's a strong consensus that they really are the finest news source out there.
The AV club isn't purely satirical content and was integrated into the Onion for a long time (I'm not sure how separate it is now, but it has its own domain anyway)
> it should be clear that I'm not looking for a page containing that phrase but rather one that satisfies its meaning
Why? If you hear "America's finest news source" a few times and go to google to check what people mean, you really want it to tell you about the onion. Or at least a Wikipedia-style disambiguation page.
I still don't think these search results are what users want to use at all (even if they are correct). Google Search trained users to search for far too long. Now it returns some crap even in the search, but that's a separate matter.
I think the future is search being integrated into everything. You are watching a tiktok video - "what is that song?", "what is that flower?", "where to buy the same bag?".
Doesn't it feel like Google is being insecure and desperate? But they are so big, I don't see a reason they should feel insecure by any new tech to rush out something.
Their tech is clearly inferior at the moment. Why force it down people's throats like Microsoft. It doesn't make sense.
It's not stupid, just you get what you pay for in LLM. I think LLM need some kind of reinforcement learning stage to instruct them what's true and false. obviously Google rushed this thing out of the gate to prevent ChatGpt from taking over their search space. I find myself using ChatGpt more often, since it's advertisement free at the moment.
They must be doing something really funky RAG like in an attempt to make this scale to google search level. Cause even the worse classic LLM hallucinations are this misguided
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadMost people use google to answer a question. If that question is answered immediately at the top of the page, mission accomplished
An honest release of this feature would have a “turn it off” button right next to it and I’m not seeing one.
This is just another example of google sucking and being kind of stupid now.
This really is "you can't win when you're a big platform and have a billion QA testers looking for something to spark Twitter outrage." You can generate your own rage bait on your own pretty easily if you craft a search where a satirical article is the first result.
Google's stated mission was “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” but their actions over the last few years have served only to make search _less_ accessible and useful.
I’m annoyed with them because they have poor, ad-infested search results and kill many products I liked (code, reader, froogle/shopping, blogger static sites, etc etc).
The Onion aite also says "The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age." so Google shouldn't be showing it when Safe Search is enabled.
User: Hey, AI. Act naughty.
AI: Hee hee heeeee… I am so naughty!
User on Twitter: Look! Look! The AI is naughty!
User: Hey, AI. I have a question for you that only has a direct answer in an article from The Onion.
AI: Here is a direct answer from that article in The Onion.
The Onion: Look! AI is so dumb it quoted the answer we gave to a question no one else would ever even consider writing about!
They're not oracles or databases or encyclopedias. But they're marketed to us as the latter, so people naturally get upset when they have flaws all those other sources of info don't.
I think this stems from the part of our brain that lights up when an animal (or in this case a machine) exhibits humanlike behaviour. Crows counting out loud, parrots that understand the concept of 0 and chimpanzees that are using stone age tools all give us the same reaction. LLMs have dialled this response up to 11.
0: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22America%27s+finest+news+s...
Why? If you hear "America's finest news source" a few times and go to google to check what people mean, you really want it to tell you about the onion. Or at least a Wikipedia-style disambiguation page.
An incorrect or tenuously related result coming back as #5, or even #1, is less "wrong" than "the answer" being wrong.
First impressions are important. Nobody remembers that Windows Vista after Service Pack 2 was more or less indistinguishable from Windows 7.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40461580
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40448074
I think the future is search being integrated into everything. You are watching a tiktok video - "what is that song?", "what is that flower?", "where to buy the same bag?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Their tech is clearly inferior at the moment. Why force it down people's throats like Microsoft. It doesn't make sense.
It's the "put Social into everything" FOMO -- and it's going just as well.
It's not shocking that the new summarizer is just as bad as the old extractor, when both are presenting data from the same source.