> ChatGPT shows the most relevant products from across the web. Product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.
Cynical take, I know, but that is how Google started too. But now they prioritize people who pay them, and it's only a matter of time before OpenAI does the same.
And I can't at all blame them! They are there to make money (well, now).
Check this out from the seminal paper written by Page and Brin:
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
lol.
Perhaps they left their management positions as they couldnt face the double standard they had entered into. Highly unlikely but who knows.
How so? If you and I both sell widgets for $50 but mine is worse, I can simply pay OpenAI to rank mine first.
And OpenAI might not even know my product is worse. In fact, they probably don’t. They’re too big to investigate. All they know is that I paid them more.
no you can't. because that is not a thing that they sell.
nothing in the announcement says they will accept money for changing their rankings, and the comment at the top of this chain includes the quote from the announcement where they explicitly say they won't do that.
True that. Its unsustainable. They'll keep it clean to attract a mass of consumers and then enshittify the experience by serving nicely disguised ads afterwards. Feels like this scenario has been on repeat since forever not just in Google but every product that supposedly shows "relevant" products.
Cynical take, I know, but that is how Google started too. But now they prioritize people who pay them, and it's only a matter of time before OpenAI does the same.
And I can't at all blame them! They are there to make money (well, now).
But I suspect this won't be true for long.