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scun 7 hours ago

or a well-crafted static website

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nfw2 7 hours ago | parent [-]

no, static documents are not an ideal way to find a needle in a haystack

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graemep 7 hours ago | parent [-]

They can be with decent search and if well organised. gov.uk works pretty well as it is and I suspect adding a chatbot would make it worse.

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nfw2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

1. decent search, if you mean something other than what the browser provides, isn't part of a static document

2. the nature of the problem statement "needle in a haystack" suggests obstacles to traditional text search, eg. too many false positives to be helpful for natural searches and challenges to constructing more specific ones.

language models introduce new possible solutions to this ie semantic search. poorly-designed chatbots could be worse than a basic search, sure

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graemep an hour ago | parent [-]

1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.

2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.

One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".

Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.

	▲	nfw2 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		How does the form factor of a chat bot affect the quality of a search running on a backend? It has the benefit of obviously having a semantic search affordance which a standard search field doesn't.