{"id":245331,"date":"2025-10-28T02:01:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T02:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/245331\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T02:01:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T02:01:12","slug":"ai-powered-search-engines-rely-on-less-popular-sources-researchers-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/245331\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-powered search engines rely on \u201cless popular\u201d sources, researchers find"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, but which one is better?<\/p>\n

These differences don\u2019t necessarily mean the AI-generated results are \u201cworse,\u201d of course. The researchers found that GPT-based searches were more likely to cite sources like corporate entities and encyclopedias for their information, for instance, while almost never citing social media websites.<\/p>\n

An LLM-based analysis tool<\/a> found that AI-powered search results also tended to cover a similar number of identifiable \u201cconcepts\u201d as the traditional top 10 links, suggesting a similar level of detail, diversity, and novelty in the results. At the same time, the researchers found that \u201cgenerative engines tend to compress information, sometimes omitting secondary or ambiguous aspects that traditional search retains.\u201d That was especially true for more ambiguous search terms (such as names shared by different people), for which \u201corganic search results provide better coverage,\u201d the researchers found.<\/p>\n


\n \"\"
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Google Gemini search in particular was more likely to cite low-popularity domains.<\/p>\n

Google Gemini search in particular was more likely to cite low-popularity domains.<\/p>\n

Credit:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kirsten et al<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The AI search engines also arguably have an advantage in being able to weave pre-trained \u201cinternal knowledge\u201d in with data culled from cited websites. That was especially true for GPT-4o with Search Tool, which often didn\u2019t cite any web sources and simply provided a direct response based on its training.<\/p>\n

But this reliance on pre-trained data can become a limitation when searching for timely information. For search terms pulled from Google\u2019s list of Trending Queries for September 15, the researchers found GPT-4o with Search Tool often responded with messages along the lines of \u201ccould you please provide more information\u201d rather than actually searching the web for up-to-date information.<\/p>\n

While the researchers didn\u2019t determine whether AI-based search engines were overall \u201cbetter\u201d or \u201cworse\u201d than traditional search engine links, they did urge future research on \u201cnew evaluation methods that jointly consider source diversity, conceptual coverage, and synthesis behavior in generative search systems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OK, but which one is better? These differences don\u2019t necessarily mean the AI-generated results are \u201cworse,\u201d of course.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-245331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}