Posts by Thomas Chopping

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Re: Just ducking tell me what search terms pitched up in your indexes

Thank you! In the words of Han Solo, we're gonna need it.

I'm managing the crawl so can tell you for a fact we've not collected websites on microcontrollers yet. But that's exactly the sort of random thing we're indexing and all of those sorts of electronic components are on our radar.

So if by veneer you mean where are we getting the data from: no connection with the big boys, we're doing the indexing ourselves. We choose which websites to crawl at the moment to ensure there's no SEO spam in the search results.

If you mean isn't our product still quite similar to theirs, in the sense that we're still fetching a list of links, yes. We did try to make it look visually distinct, so I'm going to raise that point when we do our next user interface update!

Just ducking tell me what search terms pitched up in your indexes

Every single commenter on this article has a point, as does the author of the article itself.

Yes: trying to be too clever with the search terms, showing irrelevant or just plain wrong answers, and the fact that AI search isn't actually web search at all.

These things make it easy to get answers to quick, atomic questions like Kim Kardashian's hip measurements, which are what millions of searches boil down too. But all of these bells and whistles have also ended up making it almost impossible to actually find things online any more.

Thinking about all of this, we have been developing a search engine based on filters called El Toco. By giving you a better set of filters, all of the personal data and AI-related stuff that people find annoying can be elided. Because instead of guesstimating what people want, they have a user interface so can express it for themselves.

We launched in October last year. The project has been steadfastly ignored by venture capitalists because, at the time we were fundraising, they were all into crypto. Now they're all into AI, which we've also downplayed. The result is that we had to niche down and focus on medical and scientific equipment, which is fine but not the original aim of the product.

The point of my comment is to confirm that some people in the world *are* trying to solve these problems with web search.

It's just quite a contrarian viewpoint, so has proven difficult to get people's attention.

(Also we have a miniscule marketing budget so commenting articles like this is the main sort of publicity we can afford right now).

I'm blogging about the experience on LinkedIn so feel free to check that out for some light reading on what it's been like creating a search engine behind the scenes. I'll be getting to the tech bits quite soon which will probably be quite a laugh for people who do those things professionally.