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Tag: search

  • As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders – Ars Technica

    Smart TVs: This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases—even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy. When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something’s up. With this approach, TVs miss the opportunity to appeal to customers with more relevant and impressive upgrades. There’s also a growing desire among users to disconnect their connected TVs, defeating their original purpose. Suddenly, buying a dumb TV seems smarter than buying a smart one. But smart TVs and the ongoing revenue opportunities they represent have made it extremely hard to find a TV that won’t spy on you. […]

    Google search: Admittedly, some AI summaries may be useful, but they can just as easily provide false, misleading, and even dangerous answers. And in a search context, placing AI content ahead of any other results elevates an undoubtedly less trustworthy secondary source over primary sources at a time when social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) are increasingly relying on users to fact-check misinformation.

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  • The end of search, the beginning of research – One Useful Thing

    A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I’ve been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI’s o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive – AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed.

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  • Google’s latest experiment calls local businesses to check prices and availability for you – Android Authority

    It currently supports select services: oil changes, tire and brake replacements, emissions tests, and manicure/pedicure appointments. … Businesses can opt out of receiving AI-generated calls, and Google states it “clearly discloses” when a call is automated. While the feature promises time-saving convenience, we’ll have to see how smoothly the AI handles calls with poor audio quality, strong accents, or unexpected responses.

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  • Perplexity launches an assistant for Android – TechCrunch

    Because Perplexity’s search engine powers it, Perplexity Assistant has access to the web. That allows the assistant to do things like remind you of an event by finding the right date and time and creating a calendar entry, Perplexity says. Perplexity Assistant is multimodal in the sense that it can use your phone’s camera to answer questions about what’s around you or on your screen. The assistant also maintains context from one action to another, letting you, for example, have Perplexity Assistant research restaurants in your area and reserve a table automatically, Perplexity says.

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  • AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it – MIT Technology Review

    Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. […]

    “We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. There are some real hazards here. First and foremost: Large language models will lie to you. They hallucinate. They get shit wrong. When it doesn’t have an answer, an AI model can blithely and confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, which has built its reputation over the past 20 years on reliability, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous.

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  • Introducing ChatGPT search – OpenAI

    Getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer: Ask a question in a more natural, conversational way, and ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web. Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you.

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