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Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

Google has non-aligned incentives with users and the gulf has been growing. Showing me the best answer is not the goal, showing me an ad is. I’m ready and willing to pay somebody who has a clear incentive to give me correct answers.

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> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

That explains why there are more ads, but they still have incentive to improve their search results. They've been using AI for this for years and are even more motivated now.

The problem seems to be that the web itself is getting worse due to SEO. Maybe more AI improvements will overcome that?

Maybe more AI? Surely you mean MOAR AI!!!?!

That’s my point: I want an ANSWER not a LINK. They are incentives to provide the best LINK but not the best ANSWER.

Whereas this product gives answers. Which is why I’m liking it a lot!

Google's been working on that for a bit more than a decade [1]. Presumably they're trying harder now.

I like getting answers, but I also want links to sources so I can see where they got it from.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-knowledge-graph...

I think problem is here that they hit antitrust regulators if they start giving ANSWERS instead of links.

> The problem seems to be that the web itself is getting worse due to SEO. Maybe more AI improvements will overcome that?

SEO will just start to target AI's.. maybe even using AI's to target AI's. The next arms race may be AI vs AI.

like virus-antivirus

I don’t think it’s that easy. You get little feedback about traffic and getting an AI to accurately repeat your ad would be difficult, so this sort of SEO would be much less profitable. It’s too indirect.

Rather than being like advertising, maybe it would be more like PR where your target is journalists and it only indirectly reaches readers?

Well, I am using ChatGPT as a pocket keto nutritionist and it is recommending an actual product brands quite often. Not sure if this is intentional or just learned behavior.

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