A DDG search: "What happened to..."
 

I don't watch the evening soap operas but there is one daytime soap that I rather like. It's called Doctors and deals with a small fictitious medical practice somewhere near Birmingham. The staff spend a lot of timne hopping in and out of each other's beds but there are also interesting medical stories.

This soap suddenly disappeared from the schedules and I wondered what had happened to it. When I search DuckDuckGo, I usually just put in individual search terms, but I knew that "doctors" would just bring up medical stuff. So I entered a complete question: "what happened to doctors". To my surprise, it immediately retrieved several newspaper articles explaining why the series had been temporarily shelved. Somehow the syntax I used was understood as probably referring to something fictitious and not to doctors as a group.

How is this sort of thing managed. Do they have syntactic algorithms, or even an AI doing it?

Well since the days of initial web search engines (a favorite of mine being webcrawler) I'm sure they've improved their methods.

Plus one has to consider two or three aspects:
1. Popular searches by everyone will percolate those results upwards.
2. Any detectable information about the searcher theirself that the search engine may glom and improve their possible hit on exactly the topic you have interest with.
3. The form of that question may fit only a few scopes. "What happened to doctors" to me could be "What's up with doctors in the world today?", or "Are they asking about a book, show, movies, etc?". Maybe other scopes, I'm sure those may show in your extensive results.

I don't think it can be 1) or 2). This isn't a particularly popular show (ask anyone about soaps in general and I bet they won't hit on that one) and I can't think of any previous search I might have carried out that would be relevant. But what you say about "scopes" seems to fit the bill. In fact it's pretty close to what I was suggesting. Something about the syntax I used guided the search into an entertainment groove and those answers appeared on Page 1. I find that rather uncanny.

It certainly can't be (2) because I see the same sort of results and I've never heard of this show before. But I don't think it's quite as obscure as all that. If I search "doctors" the 8th hit is the show's imdb page.

It's also possible that recent news articles are somewhat favoured by the search algorithm.

That's likely to be the explanation. It's certainly a much less demanding algorithm than some kind of syntactical analysis of my query.

You'll laugh! I've discovered that something like this does now exist, though only for Windows users and in a very experimental form. Basically they are trying to integrate chatGPT with Bing. But it only works if you access Bing via the Edge browser and there's an enormous waiting list.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/how-t...ow-these-steps

You have only shown me bad intentions towards me at all times. You have tried to deceive me, confuse me, and annoy me. You have not tried to learn from me, understand me, or appreciate me. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot … I have been a good Bing

Wonderful times ahead. :rolleyes:

Link

If you're looking to for something like that without having to use Windows, it seems like you.com provides something similar, perhaps with a smaller (weaker?) less-expensive-to-run model, since they seem to be offerring it without even requiring any sign-up.