Ask HN: Do you still use search engines? • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by drpixie » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 11:50 PM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #250

I use Kagi exclusively and refuse to offload my brain to a thing which has no accuracy guarantee ever. The emitted answers to the queries it has given can be completely bogus, and developers of these things low key expect me to believe what their black box say? Nah, never. Instead I use a search engine and do my own reading and filtering. This way I learn what I'm researching, too, so I don't fall into the vicious cy…

100% agree.

Google recently (unrequested) provided me with very detailed AI generated instructions for server config - instructions that would have completely blown away the server. There will be someone out there who just follows the bouncing ball, I hope they've got good friends, understanding colleagues, and good backups!

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

#362

Post by lqstuart » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

People started using search engines to ask stupid questions. An LLM like Gemini etc is hands-down better for that. A search engine is still better for actually searching. I do not need a 5000 word screed about a guacamole recipe.

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

#363

Post by j-bos » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 11:58 PM UTC

I find LLMs good for general knowledge, and clever rubber ducking, but if I have a very specific niche issue in some sort of language or framework, generally search is a better bet to find a stack overflow post of people going through the exact same thing I went through. And even if they don't have solutions, they'll usually link you to more valuable and specific references that you can use.

Though lately for more in-depth research I've been enjoying working with the LLM to have it do the searching for me and provide me links back to the sources.

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

#364

Post by jszymborski » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 11:59 PM UTC

I primarily use Brave Search. I'll yap with Claude for ideation every so often though.

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

#365

Post by xyst » Tue, Apr 08, 2025, 11:59 PM UTC

2025 Google is trash. Kagi is in.

LLM is okay for some use cases, but the amount of times it hallucinates bullshit makes it not trustworthy.

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

#366

Post by jemmyw » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 12:00 AM UTC

I use search engines all the time (kagi specifically). AIs don't have up to date information. How would you find reviews for products via an AI? It'll just come up with one or two, and when you read you can pick out nuance and also tell if its a genuine review or made up garbage. Or find a place to buy something. Or a place to go, and to read other peoples comments on it. Summaries aren't very useful over comments imo.

I use an LLM a lot for coding. However, I was never as much into doing web searches for programming problems anyway, I used docs more and rarely needed sites like SO. I haven't therefore moved away from search engines for that side of things.

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

#367

Post by godelmachine » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 12:01 AM UTC

I remember reading a thread on Reddit[1] where someone argued that Google stocks will go down coz no one uses search engine but the person was overwhelmed by investors who still believed in Google

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/options/s/Wr0acVKlFI

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

#368

Post by dcl » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 12:03 AM UTC

Search engines are still required for me. LLM's still get lots of very important things wrong.

Last night, I asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet to obtain historical gold prices in AUD and the ASX200 TR index values and plot the ratio of them, it got all of the tickers wrong - I had to google (it then got a bunch of other stuff wrong in the code).

Also yesterday, I was preparing a brief summary of forecasting metrics/measures for a stakeholder and it incorrectly described the properties of SMAPE (easily validated by checking Wikipedia).

I constantly have issues with my direct reports writing code using LLM's. They constantly hallucinate things for some of the SDK's we use.

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

#369

Post by seafoamteal » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

Every day. There are some questions I have that are too vague and descriptive to ask a traditional SE, so I direct those to an LLM, but on the whole I don't want to have to specify to my search engine to not give me a 500 word essay every time I use it.

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

#370

Post by nixpulvis » Wed, Apr 09, 2025, 12:07 AM UTC

Searching google still gives more current info on changing topics, no?