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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

Search engines for me is keyword based. I want to type "pizza <town> near <street>" or "<function> <library> <language>" and get sensible result. Anytime a search engines tries to interpret my query with something far semantically and ignoring my own keywords, it's a worse experience.

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Depends. I'm sure that Google trained us to rephrase at least some of our questions as keywords and to not ask some complex questions at all- or at least to expect them to fail. Plus, in general we expect Google to mostly find the information that is already there, while there is a world of information that has not been made explicit by anyone. For example, "how many pizzerias are in this town" and "which one has the highest ratings by Italian customers" are two questions that I would never dream to ask Google. Yet they're possible and not too absurd to ask to an omniscient intelligence.

I have no data to back this up, but I strongly suspect 90% of search traffic consists of dumb searches for things like, "facebook", "weather tomorrow", "gmail".

While people do search for things that could benefit from some comprehension, I don't think that's a common feature.

For example, my most recent searches and I'm probably a bit of an outlier given my usage:

"given when then" "[some project] github" "[some person] wikipedia" "[some person] wikipedia" "act of supremacy wikipedia" "NVDA stock" "django docs onetoonefield"

Perhaps one of those Wikipedia searches could have been done better as an AI search since I wanted to know something specific, but other two were just from wanting to read generally about a topic.

The benefits I get from ChatGPT and similar tools are more conversational than search like. Eg, I might be trying to solve a coding problem and want some suggestions about how I might go about it. I might act for libraries, example code, and pros and cons of different approaches. I basically use it as a replacement for another senior engineer which I can bounce ideas off of, it's not for search / knowledge type stuff and I can't see why I'd ask an AI for that. If I want to know something I can just type a few keywords into google and find a reputable site that for that info.

Yes, to take it from OP's example - I'm pretty sure people just search 'pizza' and expect Google to understand that they are probably looking for pizza near them.

How often did Google Assistant and Siri get your questions, rarely.

AI terrible until OpenAI released ChatGPT so I'm personally excited to see what ChatGPT can bring to search

you end up searching for a pub called graphite and get 10000 results about graphite bars because it's a more common term and bar = pub, right? contrived example but that seems to happen to me every other month at least

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