24 chunks · 20 episodes
...orders of magnitude more powerful than other types of systems. Social media and search engines are an example of harnessing evolution in a computer system. But you can only do it because content can't directly hurt you. Software can directly h...
...privacy angle where 60% of its early adopters use Duck Duck Go as their primary search engine. That product is only shown to have market fit with an odd sub-population of the overall market. Ideally you want your early adopters to look like a ...
...tter than alternatives, but in a category that people already knew they needed. Search engines were an established category, they just weren't very good. Google could come in with one that was radically simpler and better. Google's search engi...
...uments being incentivized to get you to buy things is way different from ads in search engine. It's possible to do this well, but it's a tightrope walk across an alligator pit in a hurricane. I don't have confidence that OpenAI has the culture...
...ced and available for everyone by default. It has to be to get picked up by any search engine. But with AI answers, they are private by default, only available to the chat app that created them. Wouldn't it be cool if people could cache Deep R...
...ce to bootstrap the models. No thought of sustainability of content production. Search engines were kind of accidentally sustainable, since they delivered clicks to publishers that earned it. But LLMs just slurped it all up like the content wa...
...sports" for agents. To prove that the agent is operating on behalf of a user. A search engine crawler is not acting on behalf of a user (not directly) A browser is a user's agent, it is acting on behalf of a user. But remember: a passport is o...
...listeners are more likely to know what it means, and it grows and compounds. In search engines, there are pipelines that detect that key phrases like [MDN] in many contexts should be interpreted like [site:developer.mozilla.org]. This is a kin...
...emains. One of the reasons the querystream is such a powerful ranking force for search engines is that each user's querystream is private. The only thing they're wasting if they do a weird query is their own time. Transactions in an economy ac...
...e is potentially worth visiting", which can then be distilled into PageRank. In search engines, the user's queries are for their own benefit, so consistent patterns can be used as ranking signals (like the proportion of [images of foo] to [foo...
...ay that implicitly helps everyone else too. This is part of the magic of modern search engines. This can be done because queries aren't code; they don't have side effects. Previously you couldn't do this kind of intent blossoming for code, bec...
...more usage, either directly or indirectly. E.g. social networks, or things like search engines that use sifting social processes. All of the data has to flow to one place to make the software better.
...ence of everyone else, too. That's how a lot of the most valuable features in a search engine are powered. LLMs are fixed in time at training, fossilized. Search engines are constantly adapting and learning as the content ecosystem changes, as...
...w categories that previously were impossible (online shopping, social networks, search engines, etc).
Search engines should coevolve with their ecosystem.[abc][abd][abe] Search engines in a late stage ecosystem are massive, complex beasts. But at the very beginning...
...f cheap, random hacks that turn out to be terrifically, unreasonably effective. Search engines aren't that different on the inside. At first it seems random and unprincipled. In a way, it is: we can't explain why this random hack works with an...
... create value for other users. For example, there's a brand new pop star, and a search engine doesn't yet know that their name is something that people will want to see pictures of. But a savvy user, on unexpectedly seeing no images for their ...
LLMs are more forgiving for trivia style answers than search engines. A common use case for me: someone tells me a half remembered quote and tells me a name that it's difficult to spell and I likely spelled incorrectl...
... the competitive dynamic of LLM-powered chatbots play out? Will it be more like search engines or more like operating systems? Search engines: Hard to build: expensive fixed cost that requires specialized knowhow. Free: marginal cost can be su...
A search engine's quality is determined by different inputs. Those inputs are transformed by an algorithm into the outputs, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Th...