Waiter, There's An LLM In My Search! (38c3)

This year Large Language Models (LLMs) in search engines told us to put glue on our pizza and eat a small rock every day. This is not ideal, and the consequences of "AI Overviews" and similar features could even be deadly for some people, like mushroom foragers. Maybe it's time for a new sort of search? In this talk I'll sketch out some possible futures and look at how we can put search back in the hands of the searcher. Also, there will be memes! Overall, the state of search right now is: not good. Search engine results are full of AI generated sludge, SEO spam and self-dealing by providers. This talk will look at the options that are open to us to improve search somewhat, including a few tips and tricks that anyone can take advantage of today to make hyperscale search providers like Google more functional again. But in many ways the most interesting question is whether we can find ways to discover stuff online that don't rely on a handful of hyperscale providers to do all the web crawling and indexing, and servicing of people's queries. In particular, what would happen if search was federated - how could we make that scaleable and performant, and what can we learn from the fediverse? Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2024/hub/event/waiter-there-s-an-llm-in-my-search/