David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Timelapse

Transcript

The Degraded Search Engine

A comic in four panels:

Panel 1. Cepper, the gothic sorceress, walks toward a large steampunk machine in the center of the library written “Gooblin” on it, colored letters. The machine resembles a rusty block, with a threadmill on one side, a seat and a typewriter-style keyboard.

Cepper: “A good old ‘search engine’, this is what I need for my research!”

Panel 2. Close up, Cepper types on the typewriter keyboard, looking at the screen.

Cepper: “R.I.N.G. O.F. F.I.R.E S.P.E.L.L.S. enter”
Cepper: “...And voilà.”

Panel 3. The machine spits out dozens of scrolls and books. Cepper reads them.

Cepper: “Wait... Why are these results so bad?...”
Book 1: “(Ad) Ten Fire Spells That Will Change Your Life (You Won’t Believe the 7th!)”
Book 2: “(Sponsored) 15 Spicy Onion Ring Recipes”
Book 3: “(For you) Top 5 Best Engagement Rings”
Book 4: “(ad) How to Start a Campfire: A Comprehensive Guide”
Book 5: “Is Your Fire Spell Not Working? (Try This One Simple Trick!)”
Book 6: “(Sponsored) Cheap Fire-Resistant Panties! (50% Off Today Only!)”

Panel 4. A librarian approaches, their AI Parrot perched on their shoulder, pointing it. Cepper looks defeated, her eyes blasé.

Librarian: “Yeah, they tuned it this way so everyone just uses their Avian Intelligence for searching now...” Cepper: “...How unsurprising.”

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[–] 38 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

TL;DR: it's an arms race.


In the before times: the WWW gets big enough to need search engines.

  • Crappy sites learn to goose their rankings.

  • Search engines get better (I.e. PageRank).

  • Crappy sites learn to SEO (a new industry is born).

While this is going on...

  • Search engine owners want profit.

  • Search engines pollute results with ads.

Eventually the signal to noise ratio for actual results to paid results goes asymptotic.

  • LLM's are developed that can regurgitate the signal and discard the noise (or at least probabilistically mimic that).

What happens tomorrow? Who knows?

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  • [–] 4 points 8 hours ago
    • LLM's are developed that can regurgitate the signal and discard the noise (or at least probabilistically mimic that).

    What happens tomorrow? Who knows?

    Actually, the signal to noise ratio of LLMs has already begun deteriorating and now that they're mostly fed data by themselves and/or other LLMs, it's only going to get worse. Probably exponentially so.

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