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Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo's browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered by an AI model, the company admits that DuckAssist might make stuff up but hopes it will happen rarely.
Here's how it works: If a DuckDuckGo user searches a question that can be answered by Wikipedia, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to generate a brief summary of what it finds in Wikipedia, with source links listed below. The summary appears above DuckDuckGo's regular search results in a special box.
[...] Update (March 9, 2023): We spoke with a representative of DuckDuckGo and they said they're using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Anthropic's Claude as LLMs. "We're experimenting with OpenAI's recently announced Turbo model, too," they said.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday March 12 2023, @06:45PM (10 children)
People my age remember search engines where one could enter almost regex-like queries. Well, not regexes strictly-speaking, but if you knew you wanted a PDF file from a site in Germany with "manual" in the filename and not containing "video" for instance, you could do something like "file:manual.*.pdf +site:de -video". Maybe not that exact syntax, and it varied from search engine to search engine, but if you knew exactly what you were looking for, you could find it quickly and precisely with the right search constraints.
If you do that in Google now, it'll return random hits from the highest paying advertisers, followed by stuff you precisely don't want from servers in countries you're explictely not interested in and containing stuff you told it to ignore, because the search has gone "soft" many years ago: it's not a strict set of requirement for your search query anymore, it's kind of a vague guideline for Google to serve you stuff that will make them the most money while still looking vaguely relevant to your query.
Now we're about to fight deluded AIs that not only don't understand what you want, but try to interpret it - because the assumption of those who push those things is that the user is a dumbass who doesn't really know what they're looking for - in the best of case, and reply plain lie or hallucinate truthiness in the worst of case.
Not only won't you find what you want like before, but on top of that, you're going to try to convince the AI that it doesn't know better than you, then double-check what it says in a regular search engine to be sure it's not telling you BS.
I don't look forward to interacting with those AIs in my daily searches, exactly the same way I dread dealing with any AI that deal with any ticket I open with any company or admininstration to deal with a very precise problem that would take 5 minutes for a real human to understand, but you can't resolve because the support guy is a now a dumb machine that guestimates the best boilerplate FAQ entry to send you in response to your query.
Sheesh, I don't know why the future of computing keeps turning into a more and more useless and depressing present... I'm sure AI will become more useful than humans, and probably sentient at some point, but before we reach that point, we have at least a solid decade of information idiocy in front of us...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2023, @07:23PM
People my age remember when the only search engine was the card catalog at the city library.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2023, @08:38PM (3 children)
You don't know why?! Do you want to take a guess?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2023, @09:29PM (1 child)
I would state the top reasons are:
-Hiring less capable, less experienced, poor fit candidates for the position just to check the box labeled Diversity and Inclusion?
-Hiring art degree majors with no CS experience and no concept of good UX to design the UI
-No criticism of bad ideas is allowed in fear of cancel culture, aka bullying-witchhunt-opression-mobocracy. When someone comes up with a ridiculous idea, no one can say anymore "This is a dumb idea" anymore out of fear of causing a torrent of "I am literally shaking right now" tears to rain down. Basically bad ideas cannot be questioned anymore, especially when they come from the D&I people.
-All good ideas and designs from the past are being thrown out because of "Ewww... some greedy boomer designed that in 2006, we have to throw that out."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2023, @10:18PM
BZZZZT.
So these companies that fire 10,000 employees at a time are squeamish about hurting Millenial's feelz and get stepped all over? Poor companies, I feelz sad now :(
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2023, @03:48PM
Here, they're probably doing less extensive and focused searching behind the scenes to reduce costs. It's also possible that a decade of fighting search engine optimization has crippled the search functionality too.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Sunday March 12 2023, @08:53PM (1 child)
Just a couple days ago people were commenting about the "big snowflakes" in Iowa. I recalled that my Dad always called them "goose feathers". I was wondering about the origin of that--whether it was a regionalism or not. Try as I might, I couldn't find an easy way to build that kind of query and avoid all the hits that were about literal geese and feathers, or snow geese. It totally ignored "goose feathers" in quotes, and it wasn't even trying to shove ads that much. It just sucked. In the old days it seems like I might have come across some essay by an English professor explaining the fascinating etymology of the expression and/or the regions in which it's used. Or for that matter, a confirmation from a meteorologist of my suspicion that such snow indicates you're near the rain-snow boundary. For all I know that kind of content is still out there, stranded beyond the reach of our currently dumbed-down search.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @07:07AM
"goose feathers" "slang" "snowflakes"
produces this: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/snowing [thefreedictionary.com]
which has this phrase: "heavy flakes like goose feathers"
https://books.google.com.my/books?id=X4tY-WEiNmwC&pg=PT889&lpg=PT889&dq=%22heavy+flakes+like+goose+feathers%22&source=bl&ots=HEMDlNx9pF&sig=ACfU3U3q9c3EhUM3jIDTQSiPPON4-07GpQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjI7fKCq9j9AhVa1nMBHcaeDscQ6AF6BAgFEAM#v=onepage&q=%22heavy%20flakes%20like%20goose%20feathers%22&f=false [google.com.my]
See also: https://www.omgchinese.com/dictionary/chinese/%E9%B9%85%E6%AF%9B%E5%A4%A7%E9%9B%AA [omgchinese.com]
鹅毛大雪 = goose feather big snow
So I guess your dad is probably not the only one...
This was via google. Bing and ddg were worse.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BlueCoffee on Sunday March 12 2023, @09:12PM (1 child)
I hear ya! Search engine results have been crap for a long time because the business suits think that returning 1900 general results is better than returning 200 specific results for various reasons:
-terms are ORed instead of ANDed so more results are returned
-they silently substitute words to return more results
-when you use +, -, and quotes there is a high probability those switches will get ignored.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday March 14 2023, @10:04PM
You're already at +5 so I can't add more. Amazon does this very thing, making looking for anything specific there an enormous waste of time.
Plenty of Fish's phone app did this shit too. Search for female, 38-57 years old, non-religious, within 25 miles. "Oh, you needed more results so we changed your search parameters". Assholes.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13 2023, @06:39AM