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In light of recent AI advancements, deciding not to buy a search engine seems like it might have been a good decision.

A lot is going to change in how search, and the associated business model, works in the next few years.




Or perhaps not. You may note that yesterday Head of Engineering and Product for Bing said [0]:

"Many people ask me whether LLMs will make web search engines less valuable, but the opposite is actually the case. LLMs make web search more critical than ever, since the combination of LLMs + web search is what produces fresher and more accurate chat results."

This is true, but what he didn't mention is where the the biggest source of pre-training data is from. This was revealed earlier this week by his colleague Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Microsoft Ad and Web Services, in the Google antitrust trial. Apparently he revealed "Bing Chat and Google Bard leverage indexes." [1].

A point on which I speculated on back in February [2].

[0] https://twitter.com/JordiRib1/status/1707103407050477772

[1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1706866080130498939

[2] https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/02/will-chatbots-kill-the-searc...


While valid points, let's not ask the head of engineering and product for a search engine whether search engines have a future as products.




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