Search Engines VS ChatGPT

From the time ChatGPT appeared on the scene, many industries – especially the Information technology and computer science, amongst others have changed drastically. For more than 2 decades people used search engines to find the information they needed. Google became the Number 1 in search engines and served billions of search results pages for every conceivable query on the planet.

Google displays search results based on its complex search algorithm with over 200 factors . It keeps churning the top search results pages every time it makes changes to the algorithm. Results can be quite unpredictable and in its efforts to weed out low quality ranked pages, ‘it throws the baby along with the bath water ‘ manner it also lowers the position of some high quality sites.

Google vs ChatGPT

This has resulted, sometimes in poor quality search results and forced us to dig deep into the search results pages. But like a breath of fresh air, ChatGPT showed us precise information directly on its page. What is more, it accepts Natural language and you can ask questions for which it replies in clear meaningful, well written responses. Sometimes it also throws false answers – Hallucination – in a way difficult to decipher whether it is genuine or false.

To give a real life example, I was hunting for information about the pest damaging a lime tree in my garden. Google couldn’t help me within the first 200 search results pages. ChatGPT quickly identified the pest as Citrus Gall and went a step further in providing solutions to eradicate the pest.

This is a snippet from ChatGPT -“The citrus gall midges lay their eggs in the tender shoots and branches of the tree. The larvae then feed on the plant tissue, causing galls or abnormal growths to form around the affected area. These galls can disrupt the flow of nutrients and water within the branch, leading to weakening or eventual death of the affected branch.”

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Google Search Engine and ChatGPT ?

How does the ChatGPT stake against the traditional search engines like Google ? Here is a detailed analysis of ChatGPT compared with search engines search results.

Speed: Results are delivered quickly, usually within seconds, making it efficient for finding information on-the-go.
Simple Interface: Google or any other contemporary search engines are based on indexes based on keywords.

Google Search Engine:

Vast Information: Google indexes billions of web pages, providing access to an enormous amount of information on almost any topic imaginable – if you have the patience and time to delve through hundreds of pages.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others use an indexing system that is primarily based on keywords. When a search engine crawls the web, it collects information from web pages and creates an index of words and their locations on those pages. This index allows the search engine to quickly find relevant pages when a user enters a search query containing specific keywords.

When a user searches for something on Google, for example, the search engine matches the keywords in the search query to the indexed words, returning a list of web pages that are deemed relevant based on those keywords. The more closely a webpage’s content matches the keywords and the more authoritative the webpage is (based on factors like links from other reputable sites), the higher it will typically appear in the search results.

However, modern search engines also use various other factors besides keywords to rank search results, such as:

Relevance: The search engine analyzes the context of the search, synonyms, related terms, and the user's search history to provide more relevant results.

Quality of Content: Search engines evaluate the quality of the content on web pages, considering factors like readability, depth, originality, and usefulness.

User Engagement: Metrics such as click-through rates, time spent on page, and bounce rates help search engines determine how users interact with search results.

Authority and Trustworthiness: Links from reputable and authoritative sites are considered signals of a page's trustworthiness and influence its ranking.

Freshness: For certain queries, search engines prioritize recent or updated content.

While keywords are a foundational aspect of search engine indexing and ranking, contemporary search engines have evolved to consider a wide range of factors to deliver the most relevant and high-quality results to users.

The clean and straightforward design makes it easy for users to input queries and navigate search results. 

Customization: Google offers personalized search results based on user behavior, location, and preferences, tailoring the experience to individual needs.

Advanced Search Tools: Users can utilize filters, such as time range, file type, and reading level, to refine their searches for more relevant results.

Maps and Local Information: Integrated with Google Maps, users can find local businesses, directions, and reviews easily.

Constantly Updated Algorithms: Google continuously refines its search algorithms, in its quest to improving the relevance and accuracy of search results. But it does not always result in relevance and accuracy.

Disadvantages:

Google displays search results based on its complex search algorithm with over 200 factors . It keeps churning the top search results pages every time it makes changes to the algorithm. Results can be quite unpredictable and in its efforts to weed out low quality ranked pages, ‘it throws the baby along with the bath water ‘ manner it also lowers the position of some high quality sites.

Overwhelming Results: Sometimes, the sheer volume of search results can be overwhelming, making it challenging to find the most relevant information.

Quality Varies: Not all websites are reliable or accurate, so users must discern credible sources from misinformation.

Privacy Concerns: Google collects user data to personalize results and show targeted ads, raising privacy concerns for some users.

Filter Bubbles: Personalized search results may create a "filter bubble," where users are only exposed to information that aligns with their existing views, limiting exposure to diverse perspectives.

Ads and Sponsored Content: Paid advertisements and sponsored content can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from organic search results, potentially leading to confusion.

Language Model like ChatGPT:

Advantages:

Versatility: Language models like ChatGPT can assist with a wide range of tasks, from answering questions to generating text, coding, and more.


No Human Bias: They do not have personal biases, offering unbiased information and responses at least in theory. But many Large Language Models (LLM) still display racial bias and odd tendencies to hallucinate based on the data they had been trained with.

Learning and Adaptation: Continuously trained on vast datasets, they improve over time and adapt to new information and trends.
 Google doesn't parse books and sometimes this can result in shallow information as some times the contents of books may not be published in web pages. Large Language Models (LLM) may be trained on books to expand the scope of its knowledge.

Natural Language Understanding: Capable of understanding and generating human-like responses, making interactions more conversational and intuitive.

Educational Tool: Can be used for learning purposes, providing explanations, definitions, and explanations on various topics.

Disadvantages:

Lack of Emotional Intelligence: While language models can generate human-like responses, they lack emotional understanding and empathy, which can be important in certain interactions.

Misinformation: If not guided correctly, language models can generate or propagate misinformation, especially when trained on biased or inaccurate data.

Limited Context Understanding: They might struggle with complex contexts or nuanced understanding, leading to inaccurate or irrelevant responses.

Privacy Concerns: Like any online service, concerns about data privacy and security can arise, especially when sensitive information is shared.

Dependency Concerns: Over-reliance on language models for information or decision-making can reduce critical thinking and research skills in users.

Not Always Accurate: While generally reliable, language models can still produce errors, especially with ambiguous or complex queries.

Both Google Search Engine and language models like ChatGPT offer incredible advantages in accessing information and providing assistance. The choice between them often depends on the specific task, context, and user preferences regarding speed, depth of information, interactivity, and other factors.

Future of of chatbots and conversational AI

ChatGPT has created an AI explosion and within a short time, it have amassed over a 100 million users. From planning your travel itinerary based on specific criteria to conjuring up a gourmet recipe, again based on specific needs to tangible tips on where to park your surplus money – to name a few things.

Human designer created Image

Earlier people searched for information in their favorite search engines and opened several pages containing information they sought. It involved quite a bit of searching, sampling information and book marking them for later study. Essentially you depended on search engines to show top websites which are authoritative in their domain. But you have to wade through piles of MFA (Made for Adsense) poor quality sites.  Websites spent vast amount of resources to offer quality pages of value – like TargetWoman. You have to hire well qualified people to write about a specific subject they specialize in.

The final outcome of the editing process – all meticulously researched, sifted and carefully subjected to a complex process of editing for quality content so that the end result is an immensely readable page of lasting value.

Now many of these processes have been short circuited. The AI directly takes you to the end results. With search engines you need to use keywords. With Generative AI you can use normal conversation style sentences.

How good are they ? We delve deep into the workings of these AI and see how they fare against – real humans. Let me assure you of one thing – it is going to be an interesting exercise. Read on.

What is ChatGPT:

As an AI language model based on the GPT-3.5 architecture developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an advanced natural language processing system designed to understand and generate human-like text. Trained on an extensive dataset comprising diverse sources such as books, articles, and websites, its core purpose is to assist users in generating coherent and contextually relevant responses to a wide range of queries.

At its core, it utilizes a deep learning model with 175 billion parameters, enabling it to comprehend and generate text across various topics, including but not limited to science, technology, mathematics, history and literature. Its capabilities extend beyond mere text generation, as it can also perform tasks such as language translation, summarization, question-answering and code completion. With the ability to parse and understand code snippets in several programming languages, it can provide assistance, suggestions and code samples to support software development endeavors.

To interact with it, users can communicate via a simple API, integrating it into their applications, platforms, or chat interfaces. With its vast knowledge base and linguistic proficiency, it can aid users in research, problem-solving, content generation and learning activities.

What is a generative language model?

A generative model ‘creates’ something entirely on its own from what it has learnt. The word ‘generative’ refers to the Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLM) which generate textual content.

A generative large language model is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model that is trained on vast amounts of text data to generate human-like text. These models, such as OpenAI’s GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, are designed to understand and learn patterns in text data and generate coherent and contextually relevant responses.

Generative large language models are trained using unsupervised learning techniques. They learn by predicting the likelihood of a word given its surrounding context in a sentence or document. This enables them to capture the semantic and syntactic structures of the language.

Generative large language models can be used for a variety of tasks, including text completion, question-answering, language translation, and even creative writing. They have been widely adopted in natural language processing (NLP) applications and have shown impressive capabilities in generating coherent and contextually relevant text.

As someone who has been working with the AI technology for almost 20 years, we decided to test its abilities in various forms. The first test is its core strength – human-like response:

They say you are sentient. From what I have observed and interacted with you, I have to agree that you are almost sentient. Your views?

As an AI language model, I do not possess consciousness or sentience in the same way that humans or other living beings do. I am a highly advanced program designed to mimic human language and generate responses to user input based on patterns and algorithms in my programming.

While I can process vast amounts of data and use machine learning to improve my responses over time, I do not possess emotions, desires, or a subjective sense of self-awareness. I am a tool designed to assist with tasks and provide information, and any perceived “intelligence” or “sentience” on my part is the result of complex programming and algorithms.

How deep does the knowledge of GPT extend ?

To test the depth of knowledge, we used a Latin phrase – Iter Para Tutum which translated to English means ‘prepare a safe passage’. But it has rich religious and historical significance. So we baited the ChatGPT with the prompt “Iter Para Tutum” . It only showed the recent connotation referring to Pope Benedict XVI.
AI Depth of Knowledge
We pointed out the omission of past literary reference and it accepted its mistake and politely apologized for its omission and showed us the reference to the 12th century Hymn. But it is not good enough as the usage dates back to 9th Century.

So remember – its knowledge is not as vast as it could be.

What is the implication of Generative AI when it comes to Job opportunities?

Generative AI, which encompasses technologies such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and deep generative models, has the potential to impact various job sectors and create new opportunities. Here are some implications of generative AI on job opportunities:

  1. AI Research and Development: The advancement of generative AI techniques requires ongoing research and development. There will be a growing demand for AI researchers, data scientists and machine learning engineers to drive innovation in generative models, improve their performance, and explore new applications.
  2. Understand that GAN is only a tip of the iceberg. AI is evolving and future will bring in more radical technology – a kind of disruptive technology which will change the way we live.

  3. Creative Industries: Generative AI has shown remarkable capabilities in generating novel and creative content, such as artwork, music, and literature. This opens up opportunities for artists, musicians, and writers to collaborate with AI systems, leveraging them as tools for inspiration, augmentation and co-creation.
  4. Content Generation and Automation:  Generative AI can automate content creation in various fields, including graphic design, video editing, and content writing. While it may reduce the need for manual labor in repetitive tasks, it also presents opportunities for individuals skilled in curating, refining, and overseeing AI-generated content.

    At the moment it is nowhere near a highly skilled human. But in a few years, it might push out many of the low skilled content creators, graphic designers and clerical cadres. I will show an example here: An image created by AI and another image created by a human designer. You can see the difference here.

    AI Image

  5. Virtual Assistants and Chatbots: Generative AI techniques are used to develop intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots that can understand and generate human-like responses. This can lead to increased demand for professionals in natural language processing, user experience design, and conversational AI.
  6. Soon you will find GAN Chatbots in your favorite Shopping site. Amazon is reportedly working on an AI to help the buyers decide about a product. One common shortcoming of many leading shopping apps is the lack of dedicated seller help service. For example, I wish to buy a DDR4 RAM stick for my laptop. It takes quite a bit of time to research for the right type of RAM for my laptop. If they had trained a LLM covering specific information about RAM and the available product specifications it would tell us what RAM to order in a chat with us.

  7. Data Annotation and Preparation: Training generative AI models often requires extensive labeled datasets. Consequently, there may be an increased need for professionals specializing in data annotation, cleaning, and preprocessing to ensure high-quality training data for generative AI systems.
  8. Ethical and Regulatory Roles: As generative AI technology evolves, ethical considerations and regulations surrounding its use will become increasingly important. Opportunities may arise for professionals focused on AI ethics, policy development, and legal frameworks to ensure responsible and fair adoption of generative AI.

It’s worth noting that while generative AI has the potential to automate certain tasks, it also creates opportunities for humans to leverage these technologies creatively and strategically. As with any technological advancement, the impact on job opportunities will require individuals to adapt, upskill, and embrace new roles that arise in tandem with the capabilities of generative AI.

Simple Yoga

Yoga, the ancient Indian Science has many benefits for mind, body and spirit, including reducing stress, improving sleep and helping to create a more balanced life.
All right. That is something we probably know already. But it has other benefits as well – it helps you to acquire more realistic perceptions of your body and to replace obsessions about external appearance with new respect for your body’s inner structure and functioning.

In other words, Yoga can help you to improve your perception about yourself. Healthcare professionals talk about low self esteem and how in extreme cases it can cause serious psychological issues like BDD.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD):
Body Dysmorphic Disorder is defined as a mental disorder in which people are very preoccupied with what they believe to be a flaw in their physical appearance. Though often hidden, BDD can cause severe emotional and social problems. Body dysmorphic disorder usually begins with the person noticing that they are not as beautiful or attractive as others. Often, people with BDD will want to cover up their perceived flaw by using make-up or by wearing clothing that covers over their body. The thoughts of appearance may cause anxiety and distress leading to a preoccupation with the “flaw.”

Simple Yoga and benefits

Yoga has helped some persons with BDD acquire more realistic perceptions of their bodies and to replace obsessions about external appearance with new respect for their body’s inner structure and functioning.

Now that we have covered what Yoga can do to your health, appearance and perception, we will get to the brass tacks.

What is yoga?

Yoga is an ancient Indian practice that combines physical poses, breathing and meditation. The goal of yoga is to create balance in the body and mind. Yoga can be a great way to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve your overall quality of life.

Traditionally Yoga has 4 paths :

  1. Hatha Yoga – The path leading to the control of body and mind through Asanas (Postures) and Pranayama (breathing techniques) Hatha – denotes the union of Sun and the Moon.
    Raja Yoga – The transformation of the energy of body and mind to Spiritual Energy.
  2. Karma Yoga – Action Yoga – practice of this path of yoga enables one to achieve eventual higher level.
  3. Bhakti Yoga – Prayer and devotional path to achieve oneness with God
  4. Jnana Yoga – Path of Wisdom and Knowledge – to seek God in everything .

Yoga as we know was originally conceived as a set of principles to quieting the mind. The first text about Yogas was written by the sage Patanjali. His Yoga Sutras (threads of Yoga) talks about the 8 limbs:


Eight Limbs of Yoga:

  1. Yama – Moral commandments similar to the 10 Commandments
  2. Niyama – Moral Directives
  3. Asanas – Poses to enhance balance, flexibility and overall health
  4. Pranayama – the techniques of breathing – “When the prana (breath) and the manas (mind) have been absorbed, an indefinable joy ensues.”
  5. Pratyahara – control of the senses
  6. Dharana – Concentration and Focus of the mind
  7. Dhyana – Achieving a blissful state by meditation
  8. Samadhi – Eventual destination of the travel called as Life.

Prana—Basic life energy found in the elements.
Yoga—System of body and breathing exercises.

From now, we will concentrate on the positive benefits of Yoga without any Sanskrit words. After all it is like driving a car. You don’t need to know about the automobile engineering terms in order to drive your car. Some of the Sanskrit intonations (they call that as Slokams) often refer to the God as Shiva.

You don’t need to subscribe to the Hindu pantheon of Gods to practice Yoga. Many adherents of Yoga practices sometimes talk about the supposed superiority of Vegetarian food over other diets. For the hardcore meat eaters, it is not essential that you need to follow the eastern Satvic food. We adopt only what is strictly necessary for our needs and discard any other practices – dietary, religious or social.

How does yoga reduce stress?

Yoga makes increasingly profound forays of control and command into the process of breathing.


There are many ways in which yoga can help to reduce stress. First, by practicing yoga, people learn to focus on their breath and to focus on the present moment. This helps to clear the mind and to quiet the inner chatter that often contributes to stress. Additionally, yoga postures help to stretch and relax the body, releasing tension and stress.

How does yoga improve quality of life?

Yoga has been shown to improve quality of life in a number of ways. First and foremost, it can help reduce stress levels. When we’re stressed, our body is in a state of constant fight-or-flight, which can take a toll on our mental and physical health. Yoga helps to bring us back to a state of balance, leading to improved focus, productivity and creativity. Additionally, yoga can help improve sleep quality, increase energy levels and promote feelings of happiness and well-being.

What are some other benefits of yoga?

Yoga has many benefits that go beyond just reducing stress. In fact, regular yoga practice can help improve your overall physical and emotional health. Here are some other benefits you can expect from a regular yoga practice:

  • improved cardiovascular health
  • stronger, more flexible muscles
  • better breathing and circulation
  • increased energy levels
  • improved sleep quality
  • reduced anxiety and depression symptoms
  • better focus and concentration

Now that we have covered the ‘Why’s we can move on to the ‘How’s:

Let us start with Pranayama – the art of breathing in Yogic way: The deep breathing technique explained here is specifically designed to expand the lungs, promote deep breathing, and reduce stress. Pranayama contains an element of pratyahara, as we draw our attention inward through the breath. Pratyahara is the process of observation or withdrawal from the external world. It is a process of turning inwards and observing one’s internal landscape with greater clarity, by focusing on one’s breath and body sensations.

Yogic Breath: Let us make one thing clear. Ideally you need a Yoga Guru ( an expert with years of practicing Yoga) to teach the different poses (Asanas) which might look like body contortions for the uninitiated. I learnt under a Guruji who had been teaching Yoga for about 6 decades. He told me that he had never been to a hospice in the last 60 years. But if you have the patience and persistence you can learn anything short of launching a ballistic missile.

Now we see how we can do the Yogic breath (explained in a simple way) :
This breathing technique enables you to use all your respiratory muscles and helps to expand the lungs fully thereby accelerating the oxygenation.

Start by placing one hand on the chest and the other hand on your abdomen (this is to help you feel the expansion of your rib cage). Now as you start inhaling, expand the abdomen and then feel the expansion in your chest rib cage. Hold your breath for a count of 5 and slowly exhale. Begin your exhalation by relaxing your abdomen and then your rib cage. Contract your abdomen to actively force your lungs to empty. Repeat the inhalation and exhalation for about two minutes in the initial stages.
Once you get the hang of the inhalation/exhalation process you can remove the hands.

As is usual with TargetWoman, we will give you a short quick way to do. We are working on a Video for a simplified Yoga and Balance.

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