> Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete.
The web UI for people using search may be obsolete, but search is hot, all AIs need it, both web and local. It's because models don't have recent information in them and are unable to reliably quote from memory.
The point is that the secret sauce in Google's search was better retrieval, and the assertion above is that the advantage there is gone. While crawling the web isn't a piece of cake, it's a much smaller moat than retrieval quality was.
My experience running a few hundred very successful shops (hundreds of thousands of orders per month) is that there's no need for quotes around 'abusive'.
95% of our load is from crawlers, so we have to pick who to serve.
If they want our data all they need to do is offer a way for us to send it, we're happy to increase exposure and shopping aggregation site updates are our second highest priority task after price and availability updates.
The web UI for people using search may be obsolete, but search is hot, all AIs need it, both web and local. It's because models don't have recent information in them and are unable to reliably quote from memory.