I have a great deal of reference materials related to the history of surveying (1550 to 1920) on my hard drive. The development of search engines like ChatGPT that utilize Artificial Intelligence to conduct searches makes it fairly easily for me make my reference materials available to collectors of surveying instruments and books.

The ChatGPT search engine that is readily available to the public searches a vast amount of data worldwide, and often comes up with very confusing answers because of all the conflicting and false information that exists on the worldwide web.

I purchased a license that allows me to limit the AI search to just the items in the database that I built. My database contains 1300 items - things like Smart’s book (The Makers of Surveying Instruments in America Since 1700), my website, some instrument maker manuals, old textbooks, and a huge batch of other documents I had on my hard drive. Thus, for the most part, a search of my database yields much more crisp and relevant search results than does the same search on the public worldwide ChatGPT database.

A search of my database will still leaving you wanting some of the time, however. AI just isn't developed enough to generate consistently great results yet. So you shouldn't treat the search results as being completely accurate.

Unlike the public version of ChatGPT, my program provides references and links to the sources ChatGPT is pulling info from. Links are not provided to sources that are protected by copyright or otherwise constitute personal information, however.

Finally, ChatGPT cannot deal with images at all, so my search engine will only generate text based results.


Examples of Searches:

Tell me everything you know about the maker Julius Hanks

Tell me everything you know about Wing Chains