We have all seen AI-based searches available on the web like Copilot, Perplexity, DuckAssist etc, which scour the web for information, present them in a summarized form, and also cite sources in support of the summary.
But how do they know which sources are legitimate and which are simple BS ? Do they exercise judgement while crawling, or do they have some kind of filter list around the “trustworthyness” of various web sources ?
Real answer: there are many existing tools and databases for domain authority.
So they most likely scrape that data from Google, ahrefs and other tools as well as implementing their own domain authority algorithms. Its really not that difficult given sufficient resources.
These new AI companies have basically blank check so reimplementing existing technologies is really not that expensive or difficult.
So scrapping “popular websites” plus “someone said this is a good source for topic X” plus wikipedia? And summarizing over them all? That sounds like a very bad idea, because it’s very fragile to poisoning?
Ya I can see AI resulting in many deaths if people start trusting it for things like “is this mushroom edible”?
Isn’t that how all ranking works everywhere? How else can it rank sources?
My point is “summarizing over all of those” and “poisoning”.
Source of category 1 says cheese is made from XYZ and yellow
Source from category 2 confirms 1 in different words and adds that it has holes
Source from category 3 confirms 2 and adds that its also blue, not only yellow
Source 4 talks about blue cheese only
Poisoning would mean that in the summary cheese is yellow with blue holes.