I have noticed that the quality of results on Google and DDG and others have been declining steadily over the last few years, and I think this is mostly a result of click farms generally getting better at gaming the system. Genuinely quality content is just being drowned out by crap.
ChatGPT doesn’t really address this. I also don’t see ChatGPT as a genuine replacement yet because 1) hallucination is still too big of a problem and 2) the value add of using natural language for queries doesn’t seem all that beneficial to me. Sorta like, how IF you are already used to a terminal, it will be faster or just as fast as a GUI for many things.
The only real value I have seen from ChatGPT, is for complex boilerplate generation that is very easy to verify. ChatGPT is fantastic for generating regex, for example. Or poems, if you prefer.
Natural language kind of stuff can be helpful if you don’t know the relvent terms for something though I haven’t had too much luck most of the time with ChatGPT on that kind of stuff. Worse is that ChatGPT is likely to lead to even more SEO spam :(
I’ve used ChatGPT for things like generating c linker scripts or writing a bochs configuration file. It would have taken me 30 minutes to research how to make a bochs config file but since I got ChatGPT to shit out something wrong but close to correct, I only had to fill in the incorrect stuff based on common sense and google a few things.
Anyone else using Kagi.com for search? I’m using it as a paid user and it’s fantastic, no ads and no tracking and results are great. I use ChatGPT for “ideas” and Kagi for specifics.
How come you feel the need to pay for your search engine? What type of searches do you do?
If a service is provided “free” you’re paying for it in another way. Usually ads, but with data collection and aggregation becoming so pervasive, you’re now paying with you’re privacy. Kagi, is just more honest of a transaction.
I don’t do anything particularly interesting, it’s just while I’m working I don’t want to get slowed down scrolling through sponsored listings and crap to get to what I need. Plus, I’d rather just pay for something than “be the product” with my data. I don’t do anything weird but more privacy is better.
For me it comes down to 3 things:
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I like the idea, that if kagi makes decisions that are unpopular with the majority of users, they will lose income as a direct consequence of that. So their business decisisons are driven by their users interests and needs, not by what advertisers want (in googles example)
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I like the basic idea of what the kagi team wants to achieve and I want to see the end result of that. But in order to be able to compete in a market dominated by tech giants like google and Microsoft I’m willing to contribute financially.
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I like my web browsing experience ad free. I know (and use) ad blockers, but I also recognise that, for any service, money has to come from somewhere. And if that service provides me with actual benefits, and I’m happy with it overall, I’m fine with paying a fee instead of seeing ads.
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Less Google = better. The results are also better, and looking for stuff is a good part of my programming job.
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Yes, me too. I’ve been looking for google alternatives for a while, because of privacy reasons, but also because the quality of the search results has gone down on google for the last few years, in my opinion. For troubleshooting searches I feel like google always sends me to useles “have you tried sfc /scannow” forum posts, instead of recources that would actually help find the root cause.
I found that DDG helped with the privacy issue, but the results were even worse. So I’ve used startpage.com for a while, and then stumbled across kagi.com, which I really like so far.
I’ve tried Bing GPT a few times, purely because I’m interested in the technology. But usually when I have questions that I couldn’t solve through kagi/google myself, BingGPT was completely useless, either not understanding the question or giving complete hallucinations as answers, that were not even present int the sources it cited.
I recently switched over since neeva shut down (though I’ve had a free account for a while). It’s amazing how good it is sometimes.
Yeah choose one,
- 12 websites written mostly by templates that are keyword-stuffed to sound like your question, and one might contain an answer in the 8th paragraph.
- A response from a bot that’s unreliable, but extremely specific to your query.
Too accurate… Finding information on the Internet is becoming a major pain in the ass these days. It doesn’t help that public tech support/help forums are being increasingly replaced by having to join hyper-specific Discord servers.
I stopped using Google search from about 4 years ago… in favour of DuckDuckGo (which is Bing search results in the backend). Makes for way faster, more focused and more privacy-minded browsing.
Bing AI got me interested but I doubt I will use it much for other than the novelty of asking it dumb questions.
Not specifically because of AI, but because Google was creeping me out and the search results were getting worse and worse due to pErSoNaLisEd SeArChEs which turns out is quite crap
@dl007, I’ve stopped using Google and Bing since almost 10 Years.
What do you use instead for web searches? DuckDuckGo or still another alternative?
@pyre_fyre, mostly Andisearch, but apart also
I pretty much exclusively use Bing now. There are some times where Bing doesn’t cut it and I need to use Google, but Google’s results are generally garbage now, full of sponsored stuff and SEO trash.
Nah I use DuckDuckGo
aka Bing
I don’t use Google very often anymore, more of a DuckDuckGo fan. However using ChatGPT has become my goto for quick howto stuff. A lot of web searches will load clickbait articles or dead end forums. Using GPT I often get a strait forward guide built for exactly what I need.
I find ChatGPT excellent to get answers to specific questions without the sales pitch that Google push’s.
A great alternative to Google is selfhosting whoogle, https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search, you get all the benefits and none of the tracking, etc. of Google search.
librex too
DuckDuckGo, with fallback to google for stuff DDG can’t find.
For some reason I just remembered Altavista.
Hello, fellow Pawnee resident
Haven’t been using Google for at least 6-7 years. Went first to DDG, then Qwant, then to SearX(NG) and ended up hosting my own (public) instance of the latter.
I set up a SearXNG instance a few days ago and I love it. I only wish I found out about it sooner.
I hadn’t used searxng before, so I just tried out a search on a couple different instances, and one instance returned absolutely nothing at all “sorry we didn’t find any results” and the other did return results, but kind of average quality results. I did the same search on my daily go to search engine DDG and got high quality helpful results. My query (what I’m hoping to begin tomorrow) “how to build raised garden boxes”. Looks like I’ll be sticking with ddg for now.
I switched to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.
Same. Switched for the privacy, stayed for the overall better results. Still hit Google for movie showtimes and some other functionality, but usually use DDG.
That said, DDG gets most of its results from Bing, so I’ll occasionally use Bing search and it’s good, too. The Bing chatbot can be good, but it regularly will type up a whole response that looks exactly like what I want, and the delete it and ask to change the subject. If it types anything that it thinks is sensitive it just shuts down.
I switched away from Google years ago. First was using DuckDuckGo, but over the last 2 years I used Ecosia more. The devs and their purpose of Ecosia seemed more friendly, and both is Bing in the back end anyway.
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Yeah, pretty much (GPT-4’s a big upgrade over the default 3.5).
That said, OpenAssistant is already really impressive for a project with such limited resources. Would love to see open-source overtake OpenAI quickly (which IMO isn’t out of the question, considering how quickly Stable Diffusion developed)
