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“What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?” Sounds like the kind of thing you pay consultants for. I mean, it does sound like exactly the kind of question a VC might ask, but it would be really hard for the average person to know what to do with this information. I guess if you could disrupt nuanced cultural mastery, that would be great, but also, impossible to get an objectively answer. Also, talk about an entrypoint for algorithmic bias.

I think the point is not that you'd get an objectively "best answer" from that type of query. NFTs are an odd example here, so let's use 3D printers instead for the boutique search example.

I found a lot more value when looking at 3D printing forum discussions from passionate hobbyists to see their opinions about the best printers on the market for various needs, compared to a search engine. In this case, the curators would be the forum moderators who would need to do the work weeding out obvious shills and misinformation. Presumably this moderation would be increasingly difficult if more people make their purchasing decisions like this and businesses respond with more astroturfing.

For something like NFT (or investing in stocks or real estate or anything), I'm not sure there will ever be a good answer for that because the super obvious conflict of interest. "It just so happens that the NFT/Stock I hold is the best investment" is not really interesting or useful and would be terribly difficult or impossible to weed out.

The issue is that {total available revenue}<<{cost of curation time} for most niche search space. It's the Consumer Reports problem: if people need your service rarely, and it's only worth a modest amount of money, then it's impossible to balance the books.

And we're just talking different flavors of Ponzi schemes if we're trying to design a system where available revenue doesn't cover costs.

I remember pre-Google, when it was an open question as to whether curated directories or search engines would be the dominant form. Turns out, the former when signal>>noise (early web) and the latter when signal<<noise (current web).

Reddit is a gamified answer to a fundamental imbalancing of profit: convince people to do valuable work for free, pay them in karma/gold stars/Monopoly money, and then sell that work (without having to pay its fair market value).

And for profitable search curation niches, there are already solutions. F.ex. Bloomberg makes $10B of revenue off one.

> Maybe I'm a control freak in this regard, but I trust myself more than any website in this regard.

You are not. Sometimes you need a search engine, not an answer engine. Google/AI can be a force for good, but often it is not; some examples & views of others covered in a thread [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/ColinHayhurst/status/1420698145898520579

an opinion is a type of information

google's mission statement is not "to organize the world's facts" but maybe you'd like it to be

> you shouldn't expect a search engine to make judgements on your behalf

This is true but it Google still tries to despite the fact that they can't. If Google returned completely unbiased results and let the reader filter the results then I think people would have fewer results.

If a search engine is full of documents curated directly by the user, through commands to save and index such and such site and this and that document, then a language model is well capable of making judgments on the user's behalf based on their interests. Further, conversations about such documents over time may give priming that narrows the judgments down to what the user approves of the AI's judgments and what they don't.

Just speaking from my experience in thinking and working on this concept over the last 2 years...I could be wrong, but testing shows some hope in this idea being a reality.

The document set is the critical part here. The user must obtain the documents that are of interest to them. Keeping the document set small and focused allows for higher quality results and discussions about the content.

If you want unbiased results, you are looking for a directory like the Yellow Pages, not a search engine.

And then when you need to search inside the Yellow Pages, you'll ask yourself why YP doesn't do something about the misleading descriptions provided by the companies in their index.

What's wrong with fewer results? I don't want thousands or millions of results for my query, give me 10 good ones. I'd imagine most people are similar here.

I misspoke. I meant people would have fewer *issues. However fewer results would also happen and I agree that it's a good thing (if you reread my original comment, you'll notice that I didn't make any value judgement on whether fewer results was good or bad).

what is an unbiased result in context of a search engine? Google has to decide what to put on page number 1 and what on number 10. This necessarily requires making judgements based on criteria any of which will be considered biased by someone. (which they are, because judging what is most relevant is the point of a search engine to begin with).

With the state of Google these days, I think if I searched “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?” I'd probably just get back results for NFT themed merchandise from Etsy and monkey pictures on Pinterest.

If you ask a language model:

> NFT collectors think that NFTs are a great way to collect and trade digital assets. They also think that NFTs have the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry.

agreed, this is a false dichotomy. I wouldn't look to any search engine to "answer" questions like “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?" Answer != Organize

I don't think even the author expects the search engine to actually "answer" the question but that the results of such a query ought to be articles, social media posts, blogs, videos of NFT collectors talking about various NFTs.

Outside of Google's attempts to summarize information in the answer box "questions" posed to a search engine are really "find me documents which discuss the subject I'm querying about and might contain my answer."

In fairness if the best example of a question that proponents for this can come up with is “What do NFT collectors think about NFTs?” it’s not obvious it’s worth solving for in the first place.