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.
It’s definitely harder to get past the clickfarm results than it used to be, ChatGPT is more of an interesting thought experiment still, I wouldn’t rely on it for actual information with how much is inferred (or just outright made up) from it’s dataset.
undefined> Or poems, if you prefer.
My favorite is to get
Explain why I should do XYZ but speak like Vin Diesel and explain it to me in terms of family and cars– that always gets some fantastic role-playing answers.
I wouldn’t personally use chatGPT ,or any language model for that matter, if factual information is the goal.
DDG has been my go-to recently, but mostly because I’m jaded with current year data harvesting and such. The internet feels like such a hassle these days .-.
@natebluehooves @dl007, to find what I search I use mostly these search engines with AI without BigBrother company spyware, is in these where AI is usefull because “de-hazzle” the internet with direct answers based on reliable resources, ChatGPT can’t do this, it has a knowledge base from 2021 and can’t give reliable and up-to-date answers because of this.
https://andisearch.com (the most private search engine ever)
https://www.perplexity.ai
https://you.com (free account to use it)These are great links. I don’t think they are stand in replacements for Google though.
Andisearch is nice but I found it a bit limiting, for example it would decide whether or not it would allow me to search for images.
Perplexity looks good but I haven’t had a proper play with it yet.
@Lobstronomosity, yes, Andisearch isn’t (yet) so good for images (it’s still in heavy developement), but normally it give very reliable answers, even accept commands and !Bangs (see help), similar to DDG, it has a reader mode and you can play YT videos in the search result. It’s from a two person startup, Google and tracking haters. Nice and usercentred people.
As with all new ventures with good intentions, I hope they succeed.
@Lobstronomosity, I think so. I’m in communication with them (Angie Hoover and Jed White) on Discord where they are quite active discussing progress, news, bugs, user feedback and suggestions that they take quite seriously. I think that small startups, as well as the one here at Mastodon present @Mojeek search, who want to offer a good alternative to these big corporations, deserve user support.
perplexity is the best for code, it still hallucinates but way less than chatgpt.
@Icarus, special for codes is Phind, a AI search engine for devs
None of the search engines is perfect, all of them have pros and flaws, because of this, if you need a deeper research it is inevitable to have several on hand.
@Icarus, there are currently more than 1.500 AI services and apps out there. If you are interest in this theme you can take a look here, it’s a complete list of all of them, daily updated.
Thanks, I’ll check it out
@Icarus, there are a lot of image AI, but my favorite is Skybox AI. Its to create 360º skyboxes for games or similar (text2image), not to create persons. But you can download the results in JPG in HD, great for stunning wallpapers or backgrounds. It’s (still) free (beta) without account and the among of images you want.
https://skybox.blockadelabs.com
Exmpl of one of my imagesyea I know about this, I’ve used it before
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.
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.
undefined> Kagi
The resu
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.
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.
Nah I use DuckDuckGo
aka Bing
They aren’t designed to be right, they’re designed to look like they’re right
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.
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 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.
it’s amazing how much the web is full of clickbait and fake sites trying to just capture search result traffic. ironically, ChatGPT seems to make it even easier to make sites like that. 😭
@sotimely @arthur i really despise those fake results appearing more frequently on top of some searches, for instance, if I lookup a word for its definition, I expect wikidictionary or Merriam Webster or something along those lines, but now, there is a bunch of crappy websites Reverso, Linguee being promoted to the first results… This is just an example of many…
Not really (I wasn’t using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.
It’s good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.
Bing was fun to exploit, but I don’t really see why it’s useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.
DuckDuckGo, with fallback to google for stuff DDG can’t find.
For some reason I just remembered Altavista.
Hello, fellow Pawnee resident
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
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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