Yes. But more for finding something I already know exists but don't remember the exact url (or are too lazy to type it in). Like going to some docs.
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
191–200 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#192I rely purely on RSS-based search and email for asking questions to friends.
No, just joking. I use libraries to read books.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#193Yes, LLMs are no match for my decades of search skills.
> decades of search skills. By decades, I assume atleast 2. So minm 20 years. I'm very interested to know about your experience. Would you please elaborate how do you filter or specifically what techniques you use to get your desired result? Thanks.
As someone with decades of search engine experience, it's mainly knowing key words and exact phrases to use as well as excludes to filter out garbage. It's a bit hard to teach/explain in a single post, but if you search basted turkey and get results of "turkey baster", then quote the key phrase "basted turkey" -shopping -sale -price, try and remove results from shopping websites with excludes. Understand most search engines will drop most 1-3 letter words from your search. Like searching for 'fire in the house' will only look for results most relevant to the words fire and house, because 'in' and 'the' are just common everywhere. So if you want that exact phrase, then quote it. Searching used to be something you had to learn how to do.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re currently in the golden age of LLMs as search engines. Eventually they’ll subtly push products and recommendations in their output to steer you toward specific things.
You mean like the golden age of speech recognition a couple of years ago when they claimed 80% of computer interfacing will be voice only?
More like as in the Golden Age of Google search, where the product optimized for returning the best, most relevant, most reputable results. As in, pre enshitification.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#195Yes. 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 feel like it has been years since search was useful for finding original documentation and sources. Around the time fuzzy responses were introduced and quote searching was removed.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If what you say is literally true: yes, I think you probably are the only one!
Yeah, I need more coffee to decide for myself if double checking all sources is linear or exponential as it progresses to check the checks.
It might even be factorial since you also need to check the checks of the checks!
Actually, it might be fully unbounded even for an n of 1.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#197Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash." LLMs aren't ever…
We’re currently in the golden age of LLMs as search engines. Eventually they’ll subtly push products and recommendations in their output to steer you toward specific things.
by "eventually" they mean "at this rate, mid-next year, if not already"
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#198Google results have gotten so terrible over the years. I switched to Kagi long ago and haven't looked back. Whenever I use Google on another computer, I'm shocked by how awful the results are compared to Kagi. As for AI search, I do find it extremely useful when I don't know the right words to search for. The LLM will instantly figure out what I'm trying to say.
Same. I switched to Kagi over a year ago, and now every other search engine looks like a steaming pile of ads and slop.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#199I 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…
Perplexity is nice indeed. I actually pointed my parents at this over the summer. They are Dutch and not really fluent in English. But you can talk to it in Dutch and it's really good. To my surprise, especially my father really seems to like it. He had a stroke a few years ago and he was never that tech savvy. But this works really well for him.
Google is trying to be too clever and failing at that at the same time. I use it for some searches when I roughly know what I'm looking at. The longer the query the more likely it is I'll be using perplexity.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#200Search engines have gotten worse but they are still much more helpful for finding certain resources compared to LLMs. I am fond of the search operators that still work like `filetype:pdf`, site:example.com`, `intitle:trailmix`.
If they get rid of those operators, then that would be really bad. But I have a feeling that’s what a lot of search engine people are itching to do.