I fundamentally cannot trust a searching system that includes a disclaimer that it can make stuff up (hallucinate) and there's nothing you can do about it.
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
11–20 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#12Yes, DDG for 95% of issues. Using an AI to search seems really, really, really dumb to me.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#13Way less than I used to. I have been a pretty advanced user since before google. The combination of AI and quick auto links to wikipedia articles on iOS have replaced much of it.
The one place I still use it extensively is in local searches for businesses and when trying to find a brand or business that I know if they don't have an app.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#14I use DDG for normal stuff, many times a day. I use LLMs for difficult to find stuff or to discover keywords.
They can be very useful, especially when looking for something closely adjacent to a popular topic, but you got to check carefully what they say.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#15Yes, DDG for 95% of issues. Using an AI to search seems really, really, really dumb to me.
I’d say come back in a few years for a bad take. But this is already a bad take.
A query in a regular search engine can at best perform like an LLM-based provider like Perplexity for simple queries.
If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#16Whether I reach for AI or Search depends on two questions. Am I looking for a site or information? If I'm looking for information, how easily can I verify it?
Websites have all kinds of extra context and links to other stuff on them. If I want to learn/discover stuff then they are still the best place to go.
For simple informational questions, all of that extra context is noise; asking gpt "what's the name of that cpp function that does xyz" is much faster than having to skim over several search results, click one, wait for 100 JavaScript libraries to load, click no on a cookies popup and then actually read the page to find the information only to realise the post is 15 years old and no longer relevant.
There are times where I know exactly what website to go to and where information is on that site and so I prefer that over AI. DDGs bangs are excellent for this: "!cpp std::string" and you are there.
Then there's the verifiability thing. Most information I am searching for is code which is trivial to verify: sometimes AI hallucinates a function but the compiler immediately tells me this and the end result is I've wasted 30 seconds which is more than offset by the time saved not scrolling through search.
Examples of things that aren't easy to verify: when's this deprecated function going to be removed, how mature is tool xyz.
Of course, there's also questions about things that happened after the AI's knowledge cutoff date. I know there are some that can access the internet now but I don't think any are free
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#17I'm also using chatgpt with its search enabled or perplexity for searching almost anything. Way more accurate and to the point. I feel like the google search will become obsolete in a short time and they have to make big changes to their UX and search engine. Although I guess most of its user base are still relying on the old ways so changing it right now has huge impacts on older users.
Interested in what your benchmark for accuracy is. I feel like for my searches that I am normally looking at a few different sources and cross referencing them to come to a conclusion about what is best for me. Do you find that AI is good at automatically figuring out what is best for you?
For instance I wanted help cooking Coq au vin yesterday. I’ve cooked it before but I couldn’t remember what temperature to set the oven to. I read about five recipes (which were all wildly different) and choose the one that best suited the ingredients and quantities I was already using.
I asked chat gpt for a coq au vin recipe, and I’ll just say I won’t be opening a restaurant using ChatGPT as my sous chef anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#18I use Kagi, but I will say, the Quick Answer (Place an interrogation after your query for an LLM based answer) has been way more useful than I initially thought
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#19I am frequently disappointed with the results I obtain from search engines, but in some of these cases I can find the things I'm looking for by tweaking the advanced search settings.
On the other hand every time I've used language models to find information I've gotten back generic or incorrect text + "sources" that have nothing to do with my query.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#20Nah. I'm perfectly conscious of the fact that ChatGPT can't be trusted with searches. Google is still my daily driver.