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Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#181

Post by rrr_oh_man »

foragerdev wrote: post #90

I still use search engines. I do not like to be spoon fed. I want to learn from the real people. Not AI generated shit. ChatGPT or other LLMs are trained on old data, they do not contain newer information. Newer information and knowledge are produced by the real humans. LLMs are great for quick fact checking, but not for searching. For example: What's the height of mount Everest? LLMs will most probably give right an…

> Newer information and knowledge are produced by the real humans.

Not anymore

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#182

Post by [deleted] »

coldpie wrote: post #168
tremarley wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted to know more about a new programming language named “Frob” or a plane crash that happened today, couldn’t you use an LLM like grok? Or any other LLM that’s continuously trained on trending news?

How do I know the LLM isn't lying to me? AIs lie all the time, it's impossible for me to trust them. I'd rather just go to the actual source and decide whether to trust it. Odds are pretty good that a programming language's homepage is not lying to me about the language; and I have my trust level for various news sites already calibrated. AIs are garbage-in garbage-out, and a whole boatload of garbage goes into them.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#183

Post by nicksrose7224 »

robrenaud wrote: post #173
coldpie wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I know the LLM isn't lying to me? AIs lie all the time, it's impossible for me to trust them. I'd rather just go to the actual source and decide whether to trust it. Odds are pretty good that a programming language's homepage is not lying to me about the language; and I have my trust level for various news sites already calibrated. AIs are garbage-in garbage-out, and a whole boatload of garbage goes into them.

They could provide verbatim snippets surrounded by explanations of relevance. Instead of the core of the answer coming from the LLM, it could piece together a few relevant contexts and just provide the glue.

They do this already, but the problem is it takes me more time to verify if what they're saying is correct than to just use a search engine. All the LLMs constantly make stuff up & have extremely low precision & recall of information

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#185

Post by coldpie »

robrenaud wrote: post #173
coldpie wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I know the LLM isn't lying to me? AIs lie all the time, it's impossible for me to trust them. I'd rather just go to the actual source and decide whether to trust it. Odds are pretty good that a programming language's homepage is not lying to me about the language; and I have my trust level for various news sites already calibrated. AIs are garbage-in garbage-out, and a whole boatload of garbage goes into them.

They could provide verbatim snippets surrounded by explanations of relevance. Instead of the core of the answer coming from the LLM, it could piece together a few relevant contexts and just provide the glue.

I don't understand how that's an improvement over a link to a project homepage or a news article. I also don't trust the "verbatim snippet" to actually be verbatim. These things lie a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#187

Post by sflanker »

degrees57 wrote: post #152

I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months. And yes, just plain old Google search is compl…

Same. I find perplexity to be much better for researching technical topics than Google or other classical search engines. I have only had occasional accuracy issues (like it suggesting something from a feature request that hasn’t been implemented rather than official documentation), but the reference links makes it easy to verify.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#188

Post by bufferoverflow »

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #76
mepian wrote: post #59

Yes, 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...

The results I get from google's AI at the top of search results are usually spot-on. I often search for code-related technical stuff, and like 90% of the time it saves me a trip to StackOverflow.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#189

Post by Delk »

Yes. I like being able to evaluate my sources. For programming or other technical topics, I'll rather read the original documentation, or third-party information whose credibility I can have some idea about.

For other topics, exact pedantic correctness may not always be as important, but I definitely do want to be able to evaluate my sources nevertheless, for other obvious reasons.

Search is actually pretty much what I want: a condensed list of possible sources of information for whatever I'm looking for. I can then build my own understanding of the topic by checking the sources and judging their credibility. Search seems to have been getting worse lately, sadly, but it's still useful.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

#190

Post by nvllsvm »

addaon wrote: post #108
nvllsvm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looks like the default search providers are not editable. I worked around with with Chromium v135 by creating a new one and deleting the old one.
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