Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

by dmitrygr • 8 months ago

888 338 8 months ago

johng2• 8 months ago

I don't know how this works under the hood but it seems like no matter how it works, it could be gamed quite easily.

cryzinger• 8 months ago

If it's just using Google search "before <x date>" filtering I don't think there's a way to game it... but I guess that depends on whether Google uses the date that it indexed a page versus the date that a page itself declares.

madars2• 8 months ago

Date displayed in Google Search results is often the self-described date from the document itself. Take a look at this "FOIA + before Jan 1, 1990" search: https://www.google.com/search?q=foia&tbs=cdr:1,cd_max:1/1/19...

None of these documents were actually published on the web by then, incl., a Watergate PDF bearing date of Nov 21, 1974 - almost 20 years before PDF format got released. Of course, WWW itself started in 1991.

Google Search's date filter is useful for finding documents about historical topics, but unreliable for proving when information actually became publicly available online.

qwertygnu• 8 months ago

True, but there's probably many ways to do this and unless AI content starts falsifying tons of its metadata (which I'm sure would have other consequences), there's definitely a way.

Plus other sites that link to the content could also give away it's date of creation, which is out of the control of the AI content.

layman51• 8 months ago

I have heard of a forum (I believe it was Physics Forums) which was very popular in the older days of the internet where some of the older posts were actually edited so that they were completely rewritten with new content. I forget what the reasoning behind it was, but it did feel shady and unethical. If I remember correctly, the impetus behind it was that the website probably went under new ownership and the new owners felt that it was okay to take over the accounts of people who hadn't logged on in several years and to completely rewrite the content of their posts.

I believe I learned about it through HN, and it was this blog post: https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

It kind of reminds me of why some people really covet older accounts when they are trying to do a social engineering attack.

CGamesPlay• 8 months ago

"Gamed quite easily" seems like a stretch, given that the target is definitionally not moving. The search engine is fundamentally searching an immutable dataset that "just" needs to be cleaned.

johng2• 8 months ago

How? They have an index from a previous date and nothing new will be allowed since that date? A whole copy of the internet? I don't think so.... I'm guessing, like others, it's based on the date the user/website/blog lists in the post. Which they can change at any time.

1gn15• 8 months ago

Does this filter out traditional SEO blogfarms?

JKCalhoun• 8 months ago

Yeah, might prefer AI-slop to marketing-slop.

al_borland• 8 months ago

They are the same. I was looking for something and tried AI. It gave me a list of stuff. When I asked for its sources, it linked me to some SEO/Amazon affiliate slop.

All AI is doing is making it harder to know what is good information and what is slop, because it obscures the source, or people ignore the source links.

swyx2• 8 months ago

somebody said once we are mining "low-background tokens" like we are mining low-background (radiation) steel post WW2 and i couldnt shake the concept out of my head

(wrote up in https://www.latent.space/i/139368545/the-concept-of-low-back... - but ironically repeating something somebody else said online is kinda what i'm willingly participating in, and it's unclear why human-origin tokens should be that much higher signal than ai-origin ones)

jeffchuber2• 8 months ago

that was me swyx

rollulus2• 8 months ago

Multiple people have coined the idea repeatedly, way before you. The oldest comment on HN I could find was in December 2022 by user spawarotti: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856172

jrjfjgkrj2• 8 months ago

every human generation built upon the slop of the previous one

but we appreciated that, we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"

rebuilder• 8 months ago

That's because the things we built on weren't slop

walrusted2• 8 months ago

the only structure you can build with slop is a burial mound

hoppp• 8 months ago

You can't build on slop because slop is a slippery slope

kgwgk• 8 months ago

Nothing conveys better the idea of a solid foundation to build upon than the word ‘slop’.

teiferer4• 8 months ago

Because the pyramids, the theory of general relativity and the Linux kernel are all totally comparable to ChatGPT output. /s

Why is anybody still surprised that the AI bubble made it that big?

bigiain2• 8 months ago

we called it "standing on the shoulders of giants"

We do not see nearly so far though.

Because these days we are standing on the shoulders of giants that have been put into a blender and ground down into a slippery pink paste and levelled out to a statistically typical 7.3mm high layer of goo.

groestl• 8 months ago

We have two optimization mechanisms though which reduce noise with respect to their optimization functions: evolution and science. They are implicitly part of "standing on the shoulders of giants", you pick the giant to stand on (or it is picked for you).

Whether or not the optimization functions align with human survival, and thus our whole existence is not a slop, we're about to find out.

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

This sounds like an Alan Kay quote. He meant that in regards to useful inventions. AI-generated spam just decreases the quality. We'd need a real alternative to this garbage from Google but all the other search engines are also bad. And their UI is also horrible - not as bad as Google, but also bad. Qwant just tries to copy/paste Google for instance (though interestingly enough, sometimes it has better results than Google - but also fewer in general, even ignornig false positive results).

ben_w2• 8 months ago

There's a reason this is comedy:

  Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

While this is religious:

  [24] “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. [25] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. [26] And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. [27] And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Humans build not on each other's slop, but on each other's success.

Capitalism, freedom of expression, the marketplace of ideas, democracy: at their best these things are ways to bend the wisdom of the crowds (such as it is) to the benefit of all; and their failures are when crowds are not wise.

The "slop" of capitalism is polluted skies, soil and water, are wage slaves and fast fashion that barely lasts one use, and are the reason why workplace health and safety rules are written in blood. The "slop" of freedom of expression includes dishonest marketing, libel, slander, and propaganda. The "slop" of democracy is populists promising everything to everyone with no way to deliver it all. The "slop" of the marketplace of ideas is every idiot demanding their own un-informed rambling be given the same weight as the considered opinions of experts.

None of these things contributed our social, technological, or economic advancement, they are simply things which happened at the same time.

AI has stuff to contribute, but using it to make an endless feed of mediocrity is not it. The flood of low-effort GenAI stuff filling feeds and drowning signal with noise, as others have said: just give us your prompt.

pseidemann3• 8 months ago

You may have one point.

The industrial age was built on dinosaur slop, and they were giant.

Mistletoe• 8 months ago

How to make fire or kill a woolly mammoth was not slop come on.

mwidell• 8 months ago

Low background steel is no longer necessary.

"...began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

juvoly• 8 months ago

Interesting. I guess that analogously, we might find that X years after some future AI content production ban, we could similarly start ignoring the low background token issue?

doe88• 8 months ago

Can't wait, in fifty years we will have our data clean again.

alansaber• 8 months ago

Since synthetic data for training is pretty ubiquitous seems like a novelty

anticensor3• 8 months ago

You should call it Predecember, referring to the eternal December.

unfunco• 8 months ago

September?

littlestymaar4• 8 months ago

ChatGPT was released exactly 3 years ago (on the 30th of November) so December it is in this context.

themanmaran• 8 months ago

The low-background steel of the internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

HelloUsername• 8 months ago

As mentioned half a year ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481

thm• 8 months ago

As mentioned 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811732

tkgally• 8 months ago

Somewhat related, the leaderboard of em-dash users on HN before ChatGPT:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

maplethorpe• 8 months ago

They should include users who used a double hyphen, too -- not everyone has easy access to em dashes.

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

Oof, I feel like you'll accidentally capture a lot of getopt_long() fans. ;)

gblargg• 8 months ago

Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.

bigiain2• 8 months ago

That would false positive me. I have used double dashes to delimit quote attribution for decades.

Like this:

"You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863

SoftTalker• 8 months ago

Double-hyphen is an en-dash. Triple-hyphen is an em-dash.

a5c113• 8 months ago

Apparently, it's not only em-dash that's distinctive. I've went through comments of the leader, and spot he also uses the backtick "’" instead of the apostrophe.

kuschku2• 8 months ago

I (~100 in the leaderboard, regardless of how you sort) also frequently use ’ (unicode apostrophe) instead of ' :D

baiwl• 8 months ago

Just to be clear this is done automatically by macOS or iOS browsers when configured properly.

lxgr2• 8 months ago

Amazing! But no love for en dashes?

Ajakks4• 8 months ago

I have used a dash - like that for almost 20 years, 100% of the time I ought to use a semi-colon and about half of the time for commas - it let's me just keep talking about things, the comma is harder pause. I've recently started seriously writing at a literary level, and I have fallen in love with the em dash - it has a fantastic function within established professional writing, where it is used often - its why the AI uses it so much.

GaryBluto2• 8 months ago

Why use this when you can use the before: syntax on most search engines?

aDyslecticCrow• 8 months ago

doesn't actually do anything anymore in Google or bing.

Thorrez• 8 months ago

Searching Google for

chatgpt

chatgpt before:2022-01-01

give me quite different results. In the 2nd query, most results have a date listed next to them in the results page, and that date is always prior to 2022. So the date filtering is "working". However, most of the dates are actually Google making a mistake and misinterpreting some unimportant date it found on the page as the date the page was created. At least one result is a Youtube video posted before 2022, that edited its title after Chatgpt was released to say Chatgpt.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search.

GaryBluto2• 8 months ago

I use it frequently to find older websites to browse. Works relatively well for most search terms. If you want something from 2005 or before I find -inurl:https works well.

progman32• 8 months ago

Not affiliated, but I've been using kagi's date range filter to similar effect. The difference in results for car maintenance subjects is astounding (and slightly infuriating).

permo-w6• 8 months ago

besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway. the same stuff that any half-awares person wouldn't have read in the past is now slightly better written, using more em dashes and instances of the word "delve". if you're consistently being caught out by this stuff then likely you need to improve your search hygiene, nothing so drastic as this

the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently, which, call me racist, but I suspect is mostly due to the influence of the large and young Indian contingent. otherwise I really don't understand where the issue lies. follow the exact same rules you do for avoiding SEO spam and you will be fine

system2• 8 months ago

Yes indeed, it is a problem. Now the old good sites have turned into AI-slop sites because they can't fight the spammers by writing slowly with humans.

permo-w6• 8 months ago

if a potential defense is to simply the spammers, then the site was previously just as likely to start hiring content-farm human slop writers as they are now likely to use AI, i.e. the site probably wasn't that great in the first place and had equal potential to deteriorate, AI or no

pajamasam• 8 months ago

SEO-spam was often at least somewhat factual and not complete generated garbage. Recipe sites, for example, usually have a button that lets you skip the SEO stuff and get to the actual recipe.

Also, the AI slop is covering almost every sentence or phrase you can think of to search. Before, if I used more niche search phrases and exact searches, I was pretty much guaranteed to get specific results. Now, I have to wade through pages and pages of nonsense.

Cadwhisker• 8 months ago

In the past, I'd find one wrong answer and I could easily spot the copies. Now there's a dozen different sites with the same wrong answer, just with better formatting and nicer text.

finaard• 8 months ago

The trick is to only search for topics where there are no answers, or only one answer leading to that blog post you wrote 10 years ago and forgot about.

zwnow• 8 months ago

Yes it is a big deal. I cant find new artists without having a fear of their art being AI generated, same for books and music. I also cant post my stuff to the internet anymore because I know its going to be fed into LLM training data. The internet is dead to me mostly and thankfully I lost almost all interest of being on my computer as much as I used to be.

darkwater• 8 months ago

besides for training future models, is this really such a big deal? most of the AI-gened text content is just replacing content-farm SEO-spam anyway.

Yes, it is because of the other side of the coin. If you are writing human-generated, curated content, previously you would just do it in your small patch of Internet, and probably SEs (Google...) will pick it up anyway because it was good quality content. You just didn't care about SEO-driven shit anyway. Now you nicely hand-written content is going to be fed into LLM training and it's going to be used - whatever you want it or not - in the next generation of AI slop content.

visarga6• 8 months ago

It's not slop if it is inspired from good content. Basically you need to add your original spices into the soup to make it not slop, or have the LLM do deep research kind of work to contrast among hundreds of sources.

Slop did not originate from AI itself, but from the feed ranking Algorithm which sets the criteria for visibility. They "prompt" humans to write slop.

AI slop is just an extension of this process, and it started long before LLMs. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both users and creators is the source of slop.

permo-w6• 8 months ago

this is basically the equivalent of saying that content-farm writers might read your content and bastardise it into seo slop. okay, sure, it's true, but it was always true and AI doesn't change it significantly

never_inline• 8 months ago

A colleague sent me a confident ChatGPT formatted bug report.

It misidentified what the actual bug was.

But the tone was so confident, and he replied to my later messages using chat gpt itself, which insisted I was wrong.

I don't like this future.

blitzar• 8 months ago

I have dozens of these over the years - many of the people responsible have "Head of ..." or "Chief ..." job titles now.

artursapek3• 8 months ago

Did you call his ass out for being lazy and wasting your time?

crazygringo• 8 months ago

It's not the future. Tell him not to do that. If it happens again, bring it to the attention of his manager. Because that's not what he's being paid for. If he continues to do it, that's grounds for firing.

What you're describing is not the future. It's a fireable offense.

Aurornis• 8 months ago

the only place I've ever had any issue with AI content is r/chess, where people love to ask ChatGPT a question and then post the answer as if they wrote it, half the time seemingly innocently

Some of the science, energy, and technology subreddits receive a lot of ChatGPT repost comment. There are a lot of people who think they’ve made a scientific or philosophical breakthrough with ChatGPT and need to share it with the world.

Even the /r/localllama subreddit gets constant AI spam from people who think they’ve vibecoded some new AI breakthrough. There have been some recent incidents where someone posted something convincing and then others wasted a lot of time until realizing the code didn’t accomplish what the post claimed it did.

Even on HN some of the “Show HN” posts are AI garbage from people trying to build portfolios. I wasted too much time trying to understand one of them until I realized they had (unknowingly?) duplicated some commits from upstream project and then let the LLM vibe code a README that sounded like an amazing breakthrough. It was actually good work, but it wasn’t theirs. It was just some vibecoding tool eventually arriving at the same code as upstream and then putting the classic LLM written, emoji-filled bullet points in the README

tobr• 8 months ago

For images, https://same.energy is a nice option that, being abandoned but still functioning since a few years, seems to naturally not have crawled any AI images. And it’s all around a great product.

voiper1• 8 months ago

Of course my first thought was: Let's use this as a tool for AI searches (when I don't need recent news).

ricardo81• 8 months ago

FWIW Mojeek (an organic search engine in the classic sense) can do this with the before: operator.

https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=britney+spears+before%3A2010...

pknerd• 8 months ago

Something generated by humans does not mean high quality.

Krssst• 8 months ago

Yes, but AI-generated is always low quality so it makes sense to filter it out.

IshKebab• 8 months ago

I wouldn't say always... Especially because you probably only noticed the bad slop. Usually it is crap though.

josephjrobison2• 8 months ago

Grokipedia would like a word

a5c113• 8 months ago

At least when reading a human-made material you can spot author's uncertainty in some topics. Usually, when someone doesn't have knowledge of something, he doesn't try to describe that. AI, however, will try to convince you that pigs can fly.

cryptozeus• 8 months ago

technically you can ask chatgpt to return the same result by asking it to filter by year

RomanPushkin• 8 months ago

For that purpose I do not update my book on LeanPub about Ruby. I just know one day people gonna read it more, because human-written content would be gold.

zkmon• 8 months ago

Most of college courses and school books haven't changed in decades. Some reputed college keep courses for Pascal and Fortran instead of Python or Java, just because, it might affect their reputation of being classical or pure or to match their campus buildings style.

fastasucan• 8 months ago

Or because the core knowledge stay the same no matter how it is expressed.

defraudbah2• 8 months ago

ChatGPT also returns content only created before ChatGPT release, which is why I still have to google damn it!

fragmede4• 8 months ago

Click the globe icon below the input box to enable web searching by ChatGPT.

stinos• 8 months ago

Is that still the case? And even if so how is it going to avoid keeping it like that in the future? Are they going to stop scraping new content, or are they going to filter it with a tool which recognizes their own content?

defraudbah2• 8 months ago

it's a known problem in ML, I think grok solved it partially and chatGPT uses another model on top to search web like suggested below. Hence MLOps field appeared, to solve models management

I find it a bit annoying to navigate between hallucinations and outdated content. Too much invalid information to filter out.

ETH_start• 8 months ago

I'm grateful that I published a large body of content pre-ChatGPT so that I have proof that I'm not completely inarticulate without AI.

phplovesong• 8 months ago

The slop is getting worse, as there is so much llm generated shit online, now new models are getting trained on the slop. Slop training slop, and slop. We have gone full circle just in a matter of a few years.

muixoozie• 8 months ago

I was replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and trying to think of all the ways one might have dialed up the dystopia to 11 (beyond what the game does). And pervasive AI slop was never on my radar. Kinda reminds me of the foreword in Neuromancer bringing attention to the fact the book was written before cellphones became popular. It's already fucking with my mind. I recently watched Frankenstein 2025 and 100% thought gen ai had a role in the CGI only to find out the director hates it so much he rather die than use it. I've been noticing little things in old movies and anime where I thought to myself (if I didn't know this was made before gen ai, I would have thought this was generated for sure). One example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSNhVQFbOc&t=412) cityscape background in this a outro scene with buildings built on top of buildings gave me ai vibes (really the only thing in this whole anime), yet this came out ~1990. So I can already recognize a paranoia / bias in myself and really can't reliably tell what's real.. Probably also other people have this and why some non-zero number of people always thinks every blog post that comes out was written by gen ai.

Cyan488• 8 months ago

I had the same experience, watching a nature documentary on a streaming service recently. It was... not so good, at least at the beginning. I was wondering if this was a pilot for AI generated content on this streaming service.

Actually, it came out in 2015 and was just low budget.

dinkblam• 8 months ago

google results were already 90% SEO crap long before ChatGPT

just use Kagi and block all SEO sites...

paweladamczuk• 8 months ago

How do we (or Kagi) know which ones are "SEO sites"? Is there some filter list or other method to determine that?

Jolter• 8 months ago

If you took Google of 2006, and used that iteration of the pagerank algorithm, you’d probably not get most of the SEO spam that’s so prevalent in Google results today.

joshvm• 8 months ago

It seems like a mixture of heuristics, explicit filtering and user reports.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

That's specifically for AI generated content, but there are other indicators like how many affiliate links are on the page and how many other users have downvoted the site in their results. The other aspect is network effect, in that everyone tunes their sites to rank highly on Google. That's presumably less effective on other indices?

shevy-java2• 8 months ago

This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.

The problem is that Google's search engine - but, oddly enough, ALL search engines - got worse before that already. I noticed that search engines got worse several years before 2022. So, AI further decreased the quality, but the quality had a downwards trend already, as it was. There are some attempts to analyse this on youtube (also owned by Google - Google ruins our digital world); some explanations made sense to me, but even then I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

One key observation I made was that the youtube search, was copied onto Google's regular search, which makes no sense for google search. If I casually search for a video on youtube, I may be semi-interested in unrelated videos. But if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information. This is not the only example, Google made the search results worse here and tries to confuse the user in clicking on things. Plus placement of ads. The quality really worsened.

justinclift6• 8 months ago

Are you aware of Kagi (kagi.com)?

With them, at least the AI stuff can be turned off.

Membership is presently about 61k, and seems to be growing about 2k per month: https://kagi.com/stats

amelius• 8 months ago

Be aware of:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SearchKagi/comments/1gvlqhm/disappo...

dncornholio• 8 months ago

How does Kagi know what is AI stuff? I don't see how they can 'just turn it off'

mebizzle• 8 months ago

Haven't looked back since I signed up.

tempacct2cmmnt• 8 months ago

I’ve had much better results with Kagi than with Google in the past few months. I’d trialed them a couple times in the past and been disappointed, but that’s no longer the case.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 8 months ago

The AI stuff in google search can be turned off.

  https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=kagi

My default browser search tool is set to google with ?udm=14 automatically appended.

vivzkestrel• 8 months ago

what if there was an open source search engine that contributors kept making better but it was a paid subscription tool?

Maken2• 8 months ago

There is also the fact that automatically generated content predates ChatGPT by a lot. By around 2020 most Google searches already returned lots of SEO-optimized pages made from scrapped content or keyword soups made by rudimentary language models or markov chains.

black3r• 8 months ago

Well there's also the fact that GPT-3 API was released in June 2020 and its writing capabilities were essentially on par with ChatGPT initial release. It was just a bit harder to use, because it wasn't yet trained to follow instructions, it only worked as a very good "autocomplete" model, so prompting was a bit "different" and you couldn't do stuff like "rewrite this existing article in your own words" at all, but if you just wanted to write some bullshit SEO spam from scratch it was already as good as ChatGPT would be 2 years later.

gield• 8 months ago

And 10 years ago, Reddit was already experimenting with auto-generated subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator.

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

It was popular way before 2020 but Google managed to keep up with SEO tricks for good decade+ before. Guess it got to breaking point.

bratwurst30002• 8 months ago

the main theory is that with bad results you have to search more and get more engaged in ads so more revenue for google. Its enshitification

master-lincoln• 8 months ago

I think this is about trustworthy content, not about a good search engine per se

trinix912• 8 months ago

But it's not necessarily trustworthy content, we had autogenerated listicles and keyword list sites before ChatGPT.

robot-wrangler• 8 months ago

Google made the search results worse here

Did you mean:

worse results near me

are worse results worth it

worse results net worth

best worse results

worse results reddit

d-lisp• 8 months ago

search: Emacs

  Did you mean vim ?

  (vice-versa)

zipy124• 8 months ago

Honestly the biggest failing is just SEO spam sites got too good at defeating the algorithm. The amount of bloody listicles or quora nonsense or backlink farming websties that come up in search is crazy.

Nextgrid• 8 months ago

This is bullshit the search engines want you to believe. It's trivial to detect sites that "defeat" the algorithm; you simply detect their incentives (ads/affiliate links) instead.

Problem is that no mainstream search engine will do it because they happen to also be in the ad business and wouldn't want to reduce their own revenue stream.

AznHisoka• 8 months ago

For most commercial related terms, I suspect if you got rid of all “spanmy” results you would be left with almost nothing. No independent blogger is gonna write about the best credit card with travel points.

watwut• 8 months ago

Afaik they did not lost the fight. They stopped trying, because it was good for short term earnings

duxup4• 8 months ago

I feel like google gave up the fight at some point. I think HN had some good articles that indicated that.

groundzeros2015• 8 months ago

Significant changes were made to Google and YouTube in 2016 and 2017 in response to the US election. The changes provided more editorial and reputation based filtering, over best content matching.

benterix• 8 months ago

if I search on Google search for specific terms, I am not interested in crap such as "others also searched for xyz" - that is just ruining the UI with irrelevant information

You assume the aim here is for you to find relevant information, not increase user retention time. (I just love the corporate speak for making people's lives worse in various ways.)

mcv3• 8 months ago

You finding relevant information used to be the aim. Enshittification started when they let go of that aim.

123malware3212• 8 months ago

ML and AI killed it between 2011-2016 somewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

juujian• 8 months ago

The problem is that before Nov 30, 2022 we also had plenty of human-generated slop bearing down on the web. SEO content specifically.

ForHackernews• 8 months ago

Goodhart's law applies to links, too. Google monetized them and destroyed their value as a signal.

jollyllama• 8 months ago

The problem

That's a separate problem. The search algorithm applied on top of the underlying content is a separate problem from the quality or origin of the underlying content, in aggregate.

0xEF• 8 months ago

I am not 100% certain why Google decided to ruin google search.

Ask Prabhakar Raghavan. Bet he knows.

xnx• 8 months ago

Counterpoint: The experience of quickly finding succinct accurate responses to queries has never been better.

Years ago, I would consider a search "failed" if the page with related information wasn't somewhere in the top 10. Now a search is "failed" if the AI answer doesn't give me exactly what I'm looking for directly.

codyb• 8 months ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo for the last... decade or so. And it still seems to return fairly relevant documentation towards the top.

To be fair, that's most of what I use search for these days is "<<Programming Language | Tool | Library | or whatever>> <<keyword | function | package>>" then navigate to the documentation, double check the versions align with what I'm writing software in, read... move on.

Sometimes I also search for "movie showtimes nyc" or for a specific venue or something.

So maybe my use cases are too specific to screw up, who knows. If not, maybe DDG is worth a try.

geldedus• 8 months ago

DuckDuckGo uses Bing search results.

EGreg• 8 months ago

Can't we just append "before:2021-01-01" to Google?

I use this to find old news articles for instance.

theodric• 8 months ago

This tool has no future. We have that in common with it, I fear.

What we really need to do is build an AI tool to filter out the AI automatically. Anybody want to help me found this company?

keiferski• 8 months ago

Projects like this remind me of a plot point in the Cyberpunk 2077 game universe. The "first internet" got too infected with dangerous AIs, so much so that a massive firewall needed to be built, and a "new" internet was built that specifically kept out the harmful AIs.

(Or something like that: it's been awhile since I played the game, and I don't remember the specific details of the story.)

It makes me wonder if a new human-only internet will need to be made at some point. It's mostly sci-fi speculation at this point, and you'd really need to hash out the details, but I am thinking of something like a meatspace-first network that continually verifies your humanity in order for you to retain access. That doesn't solve the copy-paste problem, or a thousand other ones, but I'm just thinking out loud here.

jascha_eng2• 8 months ago

The problem really is that it is impossible to verify that the content someone uploads came from their mind and not a computer program. And at some point probably all content is at least influenced by AI. The real issue is also not that I used chatgpt to look up a synonym or asked a question before writing an article, the problem is when I copy paste the content and claim I wrote it.

Ylpertnodi2• 8 months ago

The problem really is that it is impossible to verify that the content someone uploads came from their mind and not a computer program.

Er...digital id.

visarga6• 8 months ago

the problem is when I copy paste the content and claim I wrote it

Why is this the problem and not the reverse - using AI without adding anything original into the soup? I could paraphrase an AI response in my own words and it will be no better. But even if I used AI, if it writes my ideas, then it would not be AI slop.

immibis8• 8 months ago

There doesn't need to be any difference in treatment between AI slop and human slop. The point isn't to keep AI out - it's to keep spam and slop out. It doesn't matter whether it's produced by a being made of carbon or silicon.

If someone can consistently produce high-quality content with AI assistance, so be it. Let them. Most don't, though.

fao_• 8 months ago

And at some point probably all content is at least influenced by AI.

[citation needed]

(I see absolutely no reason why that should be the case)

tiborsaas2• 8 months ago

The solution is not to be able to upload content. Extremely dumb services, basic trusted information sharing. Just like a newspaper.

lukebuehler• 8 months ago

Arguably this is already happening with much human-to-human interactions moving to private groups on Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

SonnyTark• 8 months ago

I share an opinion with Nick Bostrom, once a civilization disrupting idea (like LLMs) is pulled out of the bag, there is no putting it back. People in isolation will recreate it simply because it's now possible. All we can do is adapt.

That being said, the idea of a new freer internet is reality.. Mastodon is a great example. I think private havens like discord/matrix/telegram are an important step on the way.

ionwake• 8 months ago

how does one keep ai out of private havens? thorough verification? is that the future? private havens on platforms?

visarga6• 8 months ago

a new human-only internet

Only if those humans don't take their leads from AI. If they read AI and write, not much benefit.

pavel_lishin• 8 months ago

There were also similar plot points mentioned in Peter Watts' Starfish trilogy, and Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

tiborsaas2• 8 months ago

If you play it again, make sure not to miss the Blackwall gateway quickhack:

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Blackwall_Gateway

Absolutely brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5z3GmQRXQ

---

I also noticed how simple the "new web" is when interacting with it. Of course, that's a game mechanic, but also kinda makes sense.

ndsipa_pomu• 8 months ago

It's a shame that the Militech Canto only has 4 quickhack slots

Roritharr• 8 months ago

I hope there's an uncensored version of the Internet Archive somewhere, I wish I could look at my website ca. 2001, but I think it got removed because of some fraudulent DMCA claim somewhere in the early 2010s.

lxgr2• 8 months ago

This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release on November 30, 2022.

How does it do that? At least Google seems to take website creation date metadata at face value.

erikpukinskis• 8 months ago

Interesting concept. As a side benefit this would allow you to make steady progress fighting SEO slop as well, since there can be no arms race if you are ignoring new content.

You could even add options for later cutoffs… for example, you could use today’s AIs to detect yesterday’s AI slop.

softwaredoug2• 8 months ago

The other day I was researching with ChatGPT.

* ChatGPT hallucinated an answer

* ChatGPT put it in my memory, so it persisted between conversations

* When asked for a citation, ChatGPT found 2 AI created articles to back itself up

It took a while, but I eventually found human written documentation from the organization that created the technical thingy I was investigating.

This happens A LOT for topics on the edge of knowledge easily found on the Web. Where you have to do true research, evaluate sources, and make good decisions on what you trust.

fireflash38• 8 months ago

AI reminds me of combing through stackoverflow answers. The first one might work... Or it might not. Try again, find a different SO problem and answer. Maybe third times the charm...

Except it's all via the chat bot and it isn't as easy to get it to move off of a broken solution.

visarga6• 8 months ago

Simple solution - run the same query on 3 different LLMs with different search integrations, if they concur chances of hallucination are low.

baconbrand4• 8 months ago

Or you could just… not use LLMs

asdff4• 8 months ago

Or they've converged on the same bullshit

softwaredoug2• 8 months ago

Ultimately, once I had a spidey sense something was wrong I double checked ChatGPT using Claude

vertnerd• 8 months ago

Just the other evening, as my family argued about whether some fact was or was not fake, I detached from the conversation and began fantasizing about whether it was still possible to buy a paper encyclopedia.

stopthe2• 8 months ago

In hindsight, that would've been a real utility use case for NFTs. A decentralized cryptographic prove that some content existed in a particular form at a particular moment.

Barathkanna• 8 months ago

I didn’t know “eccentric engineering” was even a term before reading this. It’s fascinating how much creativity went into solving problems before large models existed. There’s something refreshing about seeing humans brute force the weird edges of a system instead of outsourcing everything to an LLM.

It also makes me wonder how future kids will see this era. Maybe it will look the same way early mechanical computers look to us. A short period where people had to be unusually inquisitive just to make things work.

hombre_fatal• 8 months ago

Maybe like how I view my dad and the punchcard era: cool and endearing that he went through that, but thankful that I don’t have to.

dpedu• 8 months ago

I mean I get it, but it seems a bit silly. What's next - an image search engine that only returns images created before photoshop?

josephjrobison2• 8 months ago

The real gold is content created before the internet!

javaskrrt• 8 months ago

This is such a great idea

audiala• 8 months ago

It doesn't really work. I tried my website and it shows up, while definitely being built after 2023. There is a mistake in the metadata of the page that shows it as from 2011.

https://audiala.com/changelog

potato-peeler• 8 months ago

You don’t need an extension to do this. Simply add a “before:” search filter to your search query, eg - https://www.google.com/search?q=Happiness+before%3A2022

dwa3592• 8 months ago

so it's a filter by date and you chose the chatgpt's public release?

Bad_Initialism• 8 months ago

How about a search engine that only returns what you searched for, and not a million other unrelated things that it hopes you might like to buy?

This goes for you, too, website search.

diavarlyani• 8 months ago

We now need an extension to hide 3 years of the internet because it was written by robots. This timeline is undefeated.

throwawayk7h• 8 months ago

I noticed AI-generated slop taking over google search results well before ChatGPT. So I don't agree with the premise on this site that you can be "you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

1vuio0pswjnm7• 8 months ago

"This browser extension uses the Google search API to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022 so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

micromacrofoot• 8 months ago

What kind of heuristics does it use to determine age? a lot of content on Google actually backdates for some reason... presumably some sort of SEO scam?

stocksinsmocks• 8 months ago

I really thought this was going to be the Dewey Decimal system. Exclude sources from this century. It’s the only way to be sure.

ris• 8 months ago

For a while I've been saying it's a pity we hadn't been regularly trusted-timestamping everything before that point as a matter of course.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 8 months ago

low-background information

DontForgetMe2• 8 months ago

This is an imperfect search extension.

It's a hell of a lot better than nothing, if one is using chrome or Firefox (neither of which are my primary browsers).

Ajakks4• 8 months ago

If I want dead information I'll go find a newspaper. This is kind of silly. Even if AI rewrites the entire internet - we aren't going to live in a time capsule.

Plus, the AI already read everything made before 2023, so what does it matter?

Creatives need to think a bit bigger with this particular issue.

Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release

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