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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

I think the bottom line (profit) inversely correlates with the quality of search results. I've been using phind.com lately and it seems there can be search without junk even in this age.

Google has lots of people tagging search rankings, which is very similar with RLHF ranking responses from LLMs. It's interesting that using LLMs with RLHF it is possible to de-junk the search results. RLHF is great for this task, as evidenced by its effect on LLMs.

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Right. It’s less that their declining quality of search results is due to AI and more that the AI got really good at monetizing and monetizing and quality search results are sometimes in opposition.

This entire thread kinda ignore that they are also selling ad space on many sites and their objective function in ordering search is not just the best possible result. Case in point the many sites stealing stack overflow content and filling it with adverts ranking higher than the source, that committed the cardinal sin of running their own and network.

> I've been using phind.com lately and it seems there can be search without junk even in this age.

A few reasons partially (if not fully) responsible for it might be:

- Google is a hot target of SEO, not Phind.

- If Google stops indexing certain low quality without a strong justification, there would be lawsuits, or people saying how "Google hasn't indexed my site" or whatever. How would you authoritatively define "low quality"?

- Having to provide search for all spectrum of users in various languages, countries and not just for "tech users".

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