Technology

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.

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 .-.

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.

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.

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

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

They aren't designed to be right, they're designed to look like they're right

@dl007, I've stopped using Google and Bing since almost 10 Years.

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.

DuckDuckGo, with fallback to google for stuff DDG can't find.

For some reason I just remembered Altavista.

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.

I switched to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons.

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 use ChatGPT usually for things that I’m not able to find in traditional search engines easily. Or just when I know it would take me way more time when doing it in traditional fashion. The thing is that I have limited trust to what OpenAI will do with the data I provide to it. Using Brave Search or DDG makes me feel a bit more secure.

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.

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.

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)

ChatGPT seems to make stuff up way too much. I still use Google for mundane searches, duckduckgo for things I'd rather keep private.

I enjoy playing with ChatGPT a lot, but I would not trust it to provide me accurate information, it's really catastrophically bad at that. I mean, yes, sometimes it's right! But a lot of the times it just picks words that sound plausible and work well together. For anything where I want to get some facts, I use various search engines.

No, but recently i’ve stopped using Google as well. Currently I mostly use Ecosia, I think their company philosophy is pretty cool and I like the results so far. I don’t think that ChatGPT works as a substitute for a search engine for my uses at least, as many of my searches require me to check multiple links and I don’t always type in the full natural language sentences necessary for ChatGPT.

I've been using duckduckgo for years now. At least since 2016. I rarely ever have to reach for the !g tag to quick search google, but sometimes have to do a !yt tag for youtube. Mainly cause I am a visual learner.

Absolutely! I use Google only if I am in a hurry since it's on my phone's home screen, I am favoring DuckDuckGo more and more but this is only to locate websites. If I need to learn something or have a technical question I am 100% going to use ChatGPT over Google. The ads on Google have been ridiculous for a long time now and there's no way I am wading into page 2 of the results to determine where the ads end and where the answer to my query actually starts.

I switched to Bing just before the ChatGPT integration because google results have become terrible, not looking back

I've never used ChatGPT and I'm not sure I ever will. Seems really sketchy to use it as a search engine, given it will just make shit up*.

*Yes I know it's not actually capable of "making shit up" but the effect is the same

I've tried ChatGPT, but I don't think it's ready to be used as a search engine due to the occasional hallucinations. However, I'm using Brave Search, and I'm happy with the results it's giving me.

Hasn't impacted me, and hasn't drawn me to Bing either. I recommend using DuckDuckGo. I have for years now and love them!

I only use duckduckgo and startpage anyways.

Switched to DuckDuckGo but lately almost every search I make I find a reddit answer so I started searching on reddit directly

No, unfortunately it's not as smart as MS wants people to believe, and ChatGPT only understand so much before it starts making things up lol

I stopped using google for privacy and I use my self hosted instance of searxng.

I still use Google when I'm wanting to find a particular website, but ChatGPT is definitely nibbling at the use cases. ChatGPT is good when I'm brainstorming random ideas - it's important to bear in mind that it makes crap up, but sometimes that's what I'm after. If accuracy is important I can double-check it afterward.

Bing was looking like it might take over from Google for me, but in recent weeks something changed and I started not liking it any more. I would ask it for something and it would always do a websearch and seemingly base its answer entirely on whatever website it first found. That results in it giving a lot of "I don't know the answer..." responses when I know that the answers are really out there. If Bing's going to act as the "I feel lucky" button on Google then there's not much value in it. Maybe they'll fix it.

I started phasing out all things Google a few years ago, with search being the last to go a couple of years back -- I started using other search engines but would often on occasion use Google search on an assumption that I wouldn't get by without it. Yet when I finally quit Google search altogether, I realised that assumption was wrong.

Obviously the more information something has on you, the more powerful and personalised the results may be, but it's not worth it. I mean, iirc Startpage uses a lot of the power of Google's search engine to bring you results while better protecting your privacy, so there's that.

I've also used DuckDuckGo a lot, and tried Searx instances too. Basically it's anything but Google for me!

And that was before I even read the webcomic Contra Chrome.

It doesn't necessarily replace search engines, but I've been using chatgpt and sometimes Bing chat more and more. Like others have said, it does hallucinate all the time, and cannot be trusted to be 100% correct. I don't see that as a problem though, as long as I have some way to verify what it says, assuming accuracy is important. The amount of time wasted by bad answers is easily made up with the time savings on correct, or correct-ish answers.

I'm a software engineer, so a common work pattern will be to ask chatgpt "write me code to do X, meeting constraints Y and Z". As long as the subject isn't too obscure, it'll generally produce something I can work with. I then adapt that code sample to work in the actual context it is needed, and then debug it as if it were my own code. Sometimes it'll make up function and things like that, but I'll fix those and it doesn't take any more time than if I had to go learn that function as I wrote my own implementation.

Another scenario is when I get an error I'm unfamiar with. Often times, I can ask chatgpt to explain the error, and sometimes even fix it for me. This usage more directly replaces a search engine. If the fix doesn't work, then I'll do it the old fashioned way.

I'm strongly looking forward to github copilot X to be even more integrated than chatgpt in this work flow.