How to Build an Intelligent Online Answer Machine

Ever since Facebook and Amazon people have become lazier, or perhaps more accurately addicted to convenience over all else, including ethics or accuracy.

When it comes to information we used to search out reliable sources and read information in detail to find answers to our questions Now people just seek to ask so-called “chatbots” the question and accept whatever it gives them based on so called artificial intelligence (AI) which has nothing to do with intelligence or even accurate knowledge, being based on Large Language Models (LLMs) which probe the depths of the Internet to try to guess at what type of answer a real person would give based on all the garbage ever posted on the Internet, ignoring the Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO) principal.

If people insist on not doing their own research there must be a better way for an “Online Answer Machine” to do it for them.

First you need a decent search engine that can handle AND, OR, NOT and “quotation marks for exact phrase searches” Boolean operators. Google Advanced Search at it’s prime before enshitification would be ideal.

You also need a sophisticated algorithm (some people might call this AI) that can translate natural language questions into Boolean search terms and identify the subject of the question.

The next part is the key to the whole process. You need a human curated database of accurate, reliable and authoritative information sources (web sites or other online sources) indexed by subject matter.

When a question is asked the algorithm would translate it into search terms, determine the subject and search the appropriate sources for that subject to extract an answer for the user, along with citations and links to the sources the answer was taken from.

This certainly will not be as good as doing your own research choosing your own sources but this would not be built for people who want to, or know how to, do their own research.