alt Hacker NewsThree sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
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Well it's not only this, or protection from LLMs training on LLM output. LLMs training on human output is also problematic.
I was traveling to an obscure small town, doing some "research" with LLMs beforehand. Every and each one told me enthusiastically to go to "Foobar square" (name changed) for the "best street food in XYZ town", some added a lot of colorful details.
There was no Foobar square in XYZ town. There was no Foobar square anywhere in the world. There was a SINGLE old Reddit comment, with no upvotes, to a unpopular post in an unpopular subreddit, where someone clearly badly misspelled the name of the square, and said something like "for street food go to Foobar square". Nothing about "the best" even.
It's all a lie.
I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly.
Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see my results appear in a second, but they’re garbage. The links and references it gives frequently don’t match the text right next to them. It feels like someone had a KPI to make responses as fast as possible and they optimized for that above all else.
They added a “Computer” option that’s supposed to do research for you. Half the time I can’t get it to trigger through the UI. Pressing the submit button doesn’t work. When I can get it to trigger, most of those sessions will work for a while and then just stop before an answer comes back.
The only reason I keep using it is to keep observing a company that has been heavily marketed and hyped, which should have had a market leading position for something. Even non-technical people I know who listen to Joe Rogan (where Perlexity is advertising heavily, I’m told) are asking me about it.
Now there are reports of people being billed at the end of their trial period without warning, despite them saying that they will warn before this happens. There are some alarmingly bad customer support screenshots where the customer support agent (AI? Probably) acknowledges that they didn’t send the email they promised but refuse to help anyway. It takes escalating it on Twitter to get it corrected.
If I want to do actual research or AI assisted web searching I have Claude or ChatGPT do it. The results are so much higher quality and it does exactly what I ask. It may take 45 seconds instead of the instant response from Perplexity but I save time overall because the response and links are more likely to be correct
Perplexity is about to learn that Google is an anti-spam company first, search engine second
It's difficult to read more than a few sentences, when this itself is clearly a Claude artifact.
This is genius. The AI/LLM singularity has arrived, and it is shaped like a snake eating its own tail (ouroboros) [1] (or a pelican riding a bicycle).
[1] https://www.newsbiscuit.com/post/ouroboros-unclear-if-it-s-e...
If you let a plain llm search the internet with no guidance, it's basically a string matcher with no concept of quality. I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?
The search engine is now the citation, and the citation is a page that exists to be cited. Nobody in that loop has read anything, and it still works.
> The result covers Perplexity only. We have not measured ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Google’s AI Mode
Why only test Perplexity...? Isn't it the least popular among these?
I've been vary of using ai to search considering all the spam out there. I think I'd rather, perhaps naively, whitelist wikipedia, reddit, arxiv, some news sources, etc than include everything.
Is there nothing out there that does this? I'm paying for kagi and I can see that it has an api, is that maybe sufficient if configured properly?
What protection do LLM search engines have against training off content generated by other LLMs?
Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet, and LLMs are training upon their own regurgitations, with exponential amplification of all their lies and flaws?
Or will the pre-2022 corpus human knowledge be considered the low-background steel standard, and anything after that less and less reliable unless certified that it has been created by a human mind and untainted by hallucinations?
"Sharing a nameserver pair is strong circumstantial evidence of a common Cloudflare account rather than proof of ownership"
-when you read one statement that let's you know to believe no other assertions in the article....
Searching for products has become impossible. If you don't already know what you are looking for, you're screwed.
The irony of this article being fully AI generated...
Anyway, it's over for Perplexity. They never had a great a product and the only reason for using them, was when they offered Pro accounts for free. Many people joined. Me included. But with a "meh" product and the general AI business not being very sticky, they lost quite harshly.
I thought they might be able to make money as a search api/index, but this article closed the book.
Honestly, I will just flag every post that is entirely AI slop from now on. This has to stop.
The home page for this "independent research firm" is also 100% nonsense [1]. "The record a machine reads is not the one a company writes.". Ironically this low-effort spam is exactly what this report warns about, and does not belong in HN - or anywhere else.
Makes sense. Manipulating training data so that models will recommend your product is undoubtedly a big industry.
An SEO tale as old as time
my friend works for a company called 'profound' whose whole job is 'get found by ai' by spamming reddit and other talk sites ( among other things)
Who could have seen this coming?
If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated websites when I ask them to search for something. It also doesn't help that the web search tools that OAI and Anthropic have are deeply limiting: can't exclude keywords or domains.