I’ve quite solidly taken to the phrase “Just Web search it” and gently replying “yes, I’ll Web search it” when prompted to “google it”.
I like to say google and use DDG, I want them to lose their trademark
I don’t exactly trust DDG after I read about the founder. Have you tried Startpage?
I like using Google as a term for search to annoy Google.
So I’ll tell someone to use DDG to Google it
Or Google something on youtube
Or Google something on Facebook
“you are simply… Bad product”
Many people I know are also using LLMs for searching stuff.
Its just baffling how they can trust a single answer frankensteind together from often unknown sources presented as a fact.
Jeez we are fucked, aren’t we?
I’m one of those. I would prefer to google for results, but current day google is perfectly useless even for very obvious searches…
Dead Internet theory is becoming more and more plausible by the day.
My 10 yr old figured it out when googles AI couldn’t tell the difference between spiderman: miles Morales and spiderman 2. “Why is it trying to give me trophies for the old game?”
That’s a great lesson for them though! If it’s bad at something you’re familiar with, what else does it have wrong?
Doesn’t ChatGPT also use google?
I tested this whole concept with Mistral AI. It searches the web, aggregates its findings and provides an answer highlighting potential perspectives / different answers with each one providing a link to the source URL. As much as I hate AI, it does work great that way (since the LLM doesn’t have to pull stuff out of its butt).
At least it beats googles results nowadays. At least in productivity. Instead of trying to figure out which results were vaguely congruent with my search terms and not just SEO-shit, I get shitty results instantly. And with the confidence of absolute certainty that 2 prime dunning-kruger-examples would show.
Clear winner 😁
ChatGPT to Google/Wiki isn’t a bad workflow for factual questions.
Oh shit nice I had no idea this subdomain exists, guess I’ll finally be rid of those stupid ai answers in private windows as well!
And it’s just a few years ago that I complained that most people don’t know the difference between a search bar and the URL bar anymore. I.e. they are incapable of entering web addresses directly.
Well, they’re the same thing now on most browsers.
AOL keywords are back!
This started when phones became somehow less shitty for browsing the web. So now everyone without a laptop/desktop could use it. And then it got even worse when browsers got replaced by search-engine-apps. “I thought google was the internet?”
I’m just happy it isn’t IE. And that normos have started to figure out that they can easily look up things they don’t know. But yeah, “nature builds a better fool”.
At least IE is dead. And edge isn’t really that bad. It’s actually very usable as a 2nd or 3rd browser.
Google has become shit enough that you may as well.
Yet another tragedy of our time is watching Google ruin the internet with its SEO bullshit and then replace it with AI
I don’t think the answer is switching to another service that does not respect your privacy. I know it’s a bit of a meme atm but I’ve switched to kagi a few months back and haven’t looked back.
And here’s my geriatric ass still saying: “look it up on a search engine”
I just say look it up
go back in time and look it up in 2015 before the web wa[ENTER YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS TO SUBSCRIBE AND READ THE REST OF THIS POST]*
archive.is is your friend.
Archive.org could actually build a genuinely useful fully self contained search engine using the real pages and media they have.
Well that’s because in the years leading up to the release of ChatGPT Google became shittier and shittier in performing the service everyone was trying to use it for and everyone needed to work. Then came out chatbots, which basically gave that functionality back. For most people accuracy didn’t matter because they could finally feel again that going to the internet to learn about something is viable.
Then of course AI makes search algortihms even less useful and all the ethical problems about AI are raised as well.
But in the end I can’t really blame people who now use AI instead of Google or something. Finding something with just a search query was always rightfully ours and greedy companies took it to make more ad revenue. Now they are finally giving back a worse version of the original, but one that’s still far superior to what search engines devolved into by now. It’s no surprise most people love and also need that.
Soon with some tweaking the AI answers will serve the shitified shit the SEO driven algorithms shat.
Like: Use Elmer’s TM ©️ glue on your Tombstone Pizza from Kroger to keep your toppings sticky!
So you’ll get ads baked into your wrong answer.
There is at least some merit to the technology for this use-case too though (doesn’t even remotely justify the energy costs though, of course). It’s one of the few things LLMs are genuinely good at since it merely requires text ingestion and to regurgitate what was ingested on some way. As long as it’s paired with proper sources (no clue how ChatGPT does it) for all claimed findings it really can be better. Obviously it’s also “better” since it circumvents all the utterly ridiculous trash we usually have to deal with (pop-ups, ads, dark patterns, registration walls, bad search algorithms etc.) which shouldn’t be used as argument.
Paired with the “Thinking” or “Reflection” feature that simulates some basic thinking process (it even enables these things to count the corrrect amount of ‘b’ in ‘blueberry’, wow!) the results are genuinely good (Disclaimer, I only ever tested that with the free tier of Mistral AI - if you really want to use this stuff at least go to them, they’re bound to EU law). I really get why it becomes so popular, and I’d lie if I said I’d never use it myself. Would still prefer if we weren’t going down this cyberpunk timeline though…
Edit: I’m strictly speaking about using it as a search engine when it does look up websites FOR you and reads through them, not when it makes shit up itself. Only then the stuff I said applies!
Just go to your local library and look for books on the subject. 🤷♂️
Kagi that shit my guy
Kill them 😡
They replaced my algorithmic sorted response… with an algorithmic sorted response
What’s the difference these days really? At least chat gpt does not have ads
Yet
That answers are all made up, but at least they’re not ads!
My point is, that you’re forced into that with Google too
