“you’re holding it wrong” - ok, or we could make it better

Sometimes people are actually holding it wrong though

Someone? You say it like it's unknown that OpenAI got the contract

I meant in the general sense - you could have all the major players take a moral stance and say “no” but someone would say yes eventually.

Have you read the news lately? Checks and balances are dead. It’s unenforceable.

> Imagine if it had instead been the government of, say, Germany.

No other government would have chosen Grok, and likely wouldn’t have done this at all to begin with.

You miss the point entirely.

Magic refers to specific techniques used in programming, an people generally dislike these techniques once they have formed any opinion.

do people generally dislike magic once they have formed an opinion, or is it just that people who dislike magic are more prone to voicing that opinion, why, if magic is disliked by people experienced enough to form opinions, does it keep coming back around?

I would suppose the people who create "magic" solutions have at least voiced an opinion that they like magic and the people who take up those solutions the same, for the record I too dislike magic but my feeling is that I am somewhat in the minority on that.

There is a HUGE difference between framework/library "magic" and business logic "magic." When framework/library "magic" is documented it's awesome, you just need to take the time to learn it.

ReDoS cves in your dev dependencies like playwright that could literally never be exploited, so annoying.

You’re absolutely right!

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.

Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.

I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

reminds me of two things:

- the anthropic superbowl dig at chatgpt ads

"Anthropic's Super Bowl ad humorously criticized OpenAI's decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT, featuring a scenario where a man seeking advice is interrupted by an unexpected advertisement." - ddg search assist

- amish hackers: https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/

Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).

Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.

I would agree with all of that.

Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.

AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.

Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.

There's always this: https://kagi.com/

When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.

2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.

They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service

At least 2022, if not earlier.

https://hackernews.hn/item?id=30130535

The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.

I think you missed "quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results."

I tried to search right now "Xoodoo".

Google gave me more than 2 pages of results, while Bing gave me only 1 page.

After that, both Google and Bing provided countless pages full of results about Hoodoo, Voodoo, Zoodoo and the like.

The impossibility of making exact searches is what annoys me most in modern search engines.

I might make a typo sometimes, but I would prefer to correct myself when that happens, instead of the search engine always assuming that I am a moron that cannot type, thus offering every time "helpful" corrections.

I tried to repeat your experiment. I entered "xoodoo", surrounded by quotation marks into the Google search bar. I got 29 pages of results. From what I can tell by the previews, every result matches the string "xoodoo" and not any other similar string. Are you sure you are using the exact search functionality and not just typing the word into the search bar?

The turning point for me was when they changed the + sign first the "" because of their Google+ thing.

Sounds like a perfect job for AI!

Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today.

Probably only a matter of time until there’s a Snowden-esque leak saying AI is responsible for drone assassinations against targets selected by AI itself.

>Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today.

Still wouldn't mean much. Wars are won on capacity, logistics (the practical side, not ability to calculate them), land/etc advantages, and when it comes to boots on the ground, courage, knowledge of the place, local population support, etc. Not "analyzing info sources" at scale which is mostly a racket that pretends to be important.

Ok, I didn’t say anything about what you said though. I said it’s definitely either in progress or already implemented.

And I didn't refute anything about what you said. I said "Still wouldn't mean much."