I find it to be wrong so often, I'd be really careful assuming it's actually correct...
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
211–220 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#212I still primarily use search engines like Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Google (in that order). I've started sometimes bothering to read the search engines' AI overviews instead of skipping them, although I almost always still click through to their sources for any particular statement.
I just tried ChatGPT and saw that you can ask it to search the web and also can see its sources now. I still remembered how it was last time I used it, where it specifically refused to link out to external sources (looks like they changed it around last November). That's a pretty good improvement for using it as search.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#213The answer is yes, I still use, but not Google nor Bing. Relying exclusively on LLMs sounds a bit dangerous and naive.
Until when, I don't know.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#214Search 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…
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?
None of the LLMs (not even Grok) are "continuously trained" on news. A lot of them can run searches for questions that aren't handled by their training data. Here's Grok's page explaining that: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/about-grok
> In responding to user queries, Grok has a unique feature that allows it to decide whether or not to search X public posts and conduct a real-time web search on the Internet. Grok’s access to real-time public X posts allows Grok to respond to user queries with up-to-date information and insights on a wide range of topics.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#215If I don't know something, I'm not gonna trust ChatGPT to get me the right answer. It may do so 90% of the time, and make shit up the other 10%. Google sucks compared to what it was (and DDG still sucks worse, which is why I still use Goog as a fallback), but I still know how to sift through the results to find something truly informative (if it's out there; some searches, like whether some product is a scam, have been SEO'd to oblivion by the scammers).
Oh, and a major reason why Google sucks now? AI enshittification. They basically jettisoned their finely tuned algorithm in favor of "just run it through the LLM sausage grinder".
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#216Often I remember having read an article or seen a website in ~2014 or something, and now I want to find a link to it so I can cite it. I use a search engine for this, typing in the gist of what I can remember, set a date range (more clicks than it should take), and that's how I get to it.
This can be very difficult, if there's a lot of semantic overlap with a more commonly-searched mainstream topic, or if the date-range-filtering is unreliable.
Sometimes I'll look for a recipe for banana bread or something, and searching "banana bread recipe" will get me to something acceptable. Then I just have to scroll down through 10 paragraphs of SEO exposition about how much everyone loves homemade banana bread.
Searching for suppliers for products that I want to buy is, ironically, extremely difficult.
I don't trust LLMs for any kind of factual information retrieval yet.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#217I still use Google a lot. I don't bother chatting when a few keywords will bring me to the resource I want (90%+ of my searches).
Besides, Google has some convenient features that I frequently use, e.g., currency/unit/timezone conversion, stock chart.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#218Yes, for finding local information or to search for specific things. For example, to find events or shops near me, or finding reviews.
I use ChatGPT for learning about topics I don't know much about. For example, I could spend 15 minutes reading wikipedia, or I could ask it to use Wikipedia and summarize for me.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#219I 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?
No you don't. If you were doing that you wouldn't have time to eat, let alone sleep.
You check the information you decide should be verified.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#220When Google's results are garbage I will sometimes ChatGPT or others. This is increasing, but that has more to do with Google producing ever worsening results than any desire to use LLMs to "search".
Google wants to show me products to buy, which I'm almost never searching for, or they're "being super helpful" by removing/modifying my search terms, or they demonstrate that the decision makers simply don't care (or understand) what search is intended to accomplish for the user (ex: ever-present notices that there "aren't many results" for my search).
Recently tried to find a singer and song title based on lyrics. Google wouldn't present either of those, despite giving it the exact lyrics. ChatGPT gave me nonsense until I complained that it was giving me worse results than Google, at which point it gave me the correct singer but the wrong song, and then the correct song after pointing out that it was wrong about that.
Still can't get Google to do it unless my search is for the singer's name and song title, which is a bit late to the party.