As a side note, we're seeing a small but meaningful amount of traffic referred from ChatGPT. Many people essentially use it as a search tool.
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
101–110 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#102The category of search I've stopped doing is the one where I'd append "reddit" to the end. The models are going to do a great job of distilling a wide range of opinion into something super digestible better than the old flow of looking for a bunch of threads on the subject from expert-amateurs and having to read them all myself.
For the people who say they've reduced their search engine use by some large percentage, do you never need to find a particular document on the web or look for reference material?
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#103LLMs have taken up a significant share of my technical/programming questions, because there’s a pretty good chance it’ll give me a correct or mostly correct answer and if it doesn’t, the results aren’t catastrophic. I don’t trust them for much else though, and so I still use a search engine (Kagi) for most other things. For odd exceptions, I ask the LLM to cite its answers and in the event that it can’t do that or provides false citations, I fall back on search engines.
These tools are useful, but in my view the level of trust seemingly commonly being placed in them far exceeds their capabilities. They’re not capable of distinguishing confidently worded but woefully incorrect reddit posts from well-verified authoritative pages which combined with their inclination for hallucinations and overeagerness to please the user makes them dangerous in an insidious way.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#104I really think this is a "drink the koolaid" phenomenon.
Personally, I don't want an LLM synthesized result to a query. I want to read original source material on websites, preferably written by experts, in the field in which my search is targeted.
What I find in serious regression in search, is interpretation of the search query. If I search for something like "Systems containing A but not B" I just get results that contain the words A and B. The logical semantics of asking for "not B" is completely ignored. Using "-B" doesn't work, since many discussions of something that doesn't have B, will mention the word B. These errors didn't seem to be so egregious historically. There seemed to be more correct semantic interpretation of the query.
I don't know if this has to do with applying LLMs in the backend of search, but if LLMs could more accurately interpret what I'm asking for, then I would be happy to have them parse my queries and return links that meet my query specifications more accurately.
But again, I don't want a synthesized result, I want to read original source material. I see the push to make everything LLM synthesized prose, to be just another attempt to put "Big Tech" between me and the info I'm trying to access.
Just link me to the original info please...
p.s. Something like the "semantic web" which would eliminate any 3rd party search agent completely would be the ideal solution.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#105I use search engines (Google) and when they (it) fails to provide me the responses I need, I turn to ChatGPT. For example:
I recently upgraded my video card, and I run a 4K display. Suddenly the display was randomly disconnecting until I restarted the monitor. I googled my brains out trying to figure out the issue, and got nowhere.
So I gave ChatGPT a shot. I told it exactly what I upgraded from/to, and which monitor I have, and it said "Oh, your HDMI 2.0 cable is specced to work, but AMD cards love HDMI2.1 especially ones that are grounded, so go get one of those even if it's overspecced for your setup."
So I did what it said, and it worked.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#106Yes, I'm still using Google as I haven't found LLMs useful as a search engine replacement.
but the AI responses from google that dominate the screen real estate are terrible. When you repeat the exact same query and get changing (but all wrong) answers, something is broken. I've resorted to including profanity in all my searches to prevent the AI responses, which is suboptimal at work...
If you're using google you can just specify "-ai" at the end of your search, which I've started doing ever since Google's AI tried to tell me that the American Civil War was that time when the North and South fought over gold in California.
DuckDuckGo also has an option where you can turn off the AI search so that you don't have to specify every time. I've found DDG sometimes gives me better results than Google and sometimes doesn't.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#107I still prefer tranditional search engines over LLMs but I admit, its results feels worse than it has traditionally. I don't like LLMs for two reasons: * I can't really get a feel for the veracity of the information without double checking it. A lot of context I get from just reading results from a traditional search engine is lost when I get an answer from a LLM. I find it somewhat uncomfortable to just accept the a…
Am I the only one who double checks all of the information presented to me, from any source?
If what you say is literally true: yes, I think you probably are the only one!
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
but the AI responses from google that dominate the screen real estate are terrible. When you repeat the exact same query and get changing (but all wrong) answers, something is broken. I've resorted to including profanity in all my searches to prevent the AI responses, which is suboptimal at work...
Change your browsers/search URL templates to include the udm=14 query parameter. It eliminates a whole bunch of the modern noise like AI. Ex. https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=your%20query
Is there any way to do this in current (desktop) Chrome? Instructions I can find all suggest that the query string should be editable, but looks like it's locked on v134.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I the only one who double checks all of the information presented to me, from any source?
How deep do you go? Where do you stop? Just because you can find multiple independent sources saying the same thing doesn't mean it's correct.
It's done on a case by case basis.
In all honesty doing this for news and such brings me comfort. Because the truth is usually pretty vanilla.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#110I use DuckDuckGo, with the occasional reddit !g appended if I'm looking for something experience-based. For me, searches fall into one of three categories, none of which are a good fit for LLMs: 1. A single business, location, object, or concept (I really just want the Google Maps or Wikipedia page, and I'm too lazy to go straight to the site). For these queries, LLMs are either overkill or outdated. 2. Product revie…
Unfortunately DDG still enshittifies their results with AI garbage as much as they can. Both with the intrusive AI blob at the top and replacing the page summaries with dreadful AI goobleygook.