News

SearchResearch Challenge (7/12/21): How can we use LLMs to search even better?

I’ve been skeptical…

Precision targeting for SearchResearch. P/C by Mikhail Nilov (Pexels link)


… about the search capability of LLMs. But I realize they’re here to stay–no amount of witchcraft will make them go away and we can only wait for them to get better.

In the meantime, how can we use LLMs effectively in our online research? Can we learn to use these new tools in effective ways?

In other words, can we get them to do things that are difficult in “regular search”?

I think the answer is a clear yes, although as I’ve pointed out, debugging / fact-checking is required.

Still, as we saw in our post about Using LLMs to find Amazing Words…, with a little ingenuity, we can do remarkable things. (In that post, I illustrate how to use LLMs that end in -core.)

Our Challenge this week is in two parts:

1. Can you find a way to use LLMs (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, etc.) to answer research questions that would otherwise be difficult to answer? (As with the Using LLMs to find Amazing Words… example. If you find such a research task, be sure to let us know what the task is, the LLM you used, and what you did to make it work.)

2. Here’s an example of this difficult to answer “regular search” task: I wanted to make a list of all the SRS Challenges and Answers (the C&A list) since the beginning of this year. I used an LLM to help me figure out the process. Can you figure out what I did? (I’ll tell you now that I learned a bunch in doing this, and it only took me about 10 minutes from start-to-finish. I count that as a major win.)

I show the answer below. Note that this C&A list is sorted by date.

List of SRS posts, only Challenges and Answers from Jan 1, 2023 – July 5, 2023:

SearchResearch Challenge (1/4/23): How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?

Answer: How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?

SearchResearch Challenge (1/18/23): Musicians travels–how did they get

Answer: Musicians travels–how did they get from A to B?

SearchResearch Challenge (2/8/23): What do you call this thing?

Answer: What do you call this thing?

SearchResearch Challenge (2/22/23): World’s largest waterfall?

Answer: World’s largest waterfall?

SearchResearch Challenge (3/8/23): What do these everyday symbols mean?

Answer: What do these everyday symbols mean?

SearchResearch Challenge (3/22/23): What do you call the sediment that

Answer: What do you call the sediment that blocks a river flowing to

SearchResearch Challenge (4/5/23): What’s this architecture all about?

Answer: What’s this architecture all about?

SearchResearch Challenge (4/19/23): How well do LLMs answer SRS

Answer: How well do LLMs answer SRS questions?

SearchResearch Challenge (5/31/23): Did they really burn ancient Roman

Answer: Did they really burn Roman statues?

SearchResearch Challenge (6/14/23): How to find the best AI-powered

Answer: How to find the best AI-powered search engine of the moment?

SearchResearch Challenge (6/28/23): How can you find a free audio book?

Answer: How can you find a free audio book?

Please post your answers here in the comments section. Be sure to tell us the steps you used to get your data into this form.

If you scroll down far enough, I’ve added a Big Hint.

Best of luck in your SRS-ing this week.

Keep Searching!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. hint below here…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Big hint: I used Bard to figure out how to do this.

I took 3 steps:
1. get the list of C&As from the blog into a text file;
2. extract out the Challenges and Answers;
3. then reverse the order of the C&A list.

Share