Key Points
Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologiesvast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a queryspring into action to serve you a simple set of relevant results...
The age of generative AI threatens to sprinkle epistemological sand into the gears of web search by fooling algorithms designed for a time when the web was mostly written by humans...
Microsofts Bing search engine informed me that he had also foreseen the appearance of search algorithms, describing a 1948 research paper by Shannon called A Short History of Searching as a seminal work in the field of computer science outlining the history of search algorithms and their evolution over time...
Francesca Tripodi, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies how search queries that produce few results, dubbed data voids, can be used to manipulate results, says large language models are affected by the same issue, because they are trained on web data and are more likely to hallucinate when an answer is absent from that training..
Before long, Tripodi says, we may see people use AI-generated content to intentionally manipulate search results, a tactic Griffins accidental experiment suggests could be powerful..
