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Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

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411–420 of 609 posts

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

#411
Absolutely, as the great Fravia+ RIP :( once said, it is in your advantage to know where and how to find possible solutions for your problems. And i am willing to even go so far as to say:

The more you thrust the models, the less cognitive load you are spending checking and verifiefing which will lead to what people call ai but which actually is nothing more than a for loop over in memory loaded data. That those who still think that: for Μessage in messages... can represent any sort of intelligence actually has already brainwashed on a new itteration of the "one armed bandit" where you click regenerate indefinatly with a random seed being distracted from what is going on around you

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

#412
I will use search as part of any research based learning so long as it remains a functional option. So long as there's some chance of the AI giving incorrect data where precision is necessitated to learn the fact, I will remain leary and manually search those specific areas later on. At the very least.

Operator words still do work in google, albeit less so than in the past - they still do the job.

I see the AI as being there to do the major leg work. But the devil's in the details and we can't simply take their word that something is fact without scrutinizing the data.

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

#414
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPt models have a people-pleasing bias and positivity bias. If you want factual information, you have to modify your prompt. I imagine you would get very different results if you asked "are Jeeps more reliable than Toyotas", or "how do Jeeps compare to the median car in terms of reliability" My impression is that different llms are more or less people pleasing. I found grok is more willing to tell me something is a b…

I wouldn't be surprised if the training was weighted to favor text it learned from more "reliable" or "professional" resources, which in the case of products, would be official sales listings that talk about how great their product is.

I don't think that's a big part of it, although it may be included.

In general, the models lean towards being Yes-Men on just about every topic, including things without official sources. I think this is a byproduct of them being trained to be friendly and agreeable. Nobody wants a product that's rude or contrarian, and this puts a huge finger on the scale. I imagine an a model unfiltered for safety and attitude and political correctness would have less of this bias (but perhaps more of other biases)

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

#415
When searching something non-programming related, I do. For example, I'm building an addition on our home. Searching for building materials, ideas, and any building science questions I have, I often find LLMs lacking. Even then, maybe 40% of the time Gemini gives me a good enough response.

On the flip side, any time I'm searching for something programming (FE, JavaScript in my case) it's last resort because an LLM is not giving me the answer I'm looking for.

This is still shocking to me, I really never thought I would replace my reliance on Google with something new.

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

#416
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do like LLMs for these tasks, unfortunately this one failed you but was a near enough miss that you couldn't see it. What you were really looking for is the Red Queen problem/hypothesis/race, named after a quote from Through the Looking Glass, with the Queen explaining to Alice: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." In particular, the Red Queen term is specifica…

This is an incorrect response. Firstly, "Evolutionary Arms Race" is not tautological, it is a specific term of art in evolutionary biology. Secondly, "evolutionary arms race" is a correct answer, it is the general case of which the Red Queen hypothesis is a special case. I do agree with you that OP described a Red Queen case, though I would hesitate to say it was because of "equilibrium"; many species in Red Queen si…

I disagree that evolutionary arms race is a specific term of art; we have many specific terms of art but 'arms race' is a broad generalization popularized by Dawkins as a pop science writer addressing a lay audience. Actual terms of art in this area would include Red Queen, the many individually termed coevolutions (antagonistic, mosaic, host-parasite, plant-herbivore, predator-prey etc), coadaptation, coextinction, the escalation hypothesis, frequency-dependent selection, reciprocal selection, asymmetric selection, the evolutionary lag, evolutionary cycling, character displacement, Fisherian runaway, evolutionary mismatch/trap, (phylogenetic) niche conservatism, fitness landscape, Grinnellian vs Eltonian niches, the competitive exclusion principle, and on and on. All of these actual terms of art fit under the broad, general umbrella of an 'arms race' with other species, which is really nothing more than a restatement of Spencer's unfortunate phrase. The latter is so widely 'known' that it is to the point that I and many of my peers try not to utter it, in an effort to reduce the work refuting the same tired misunderstandings that arise from that verbiage.

At any rate, almost NONE of these actual terms of art are about the sort of equilibrium that was the exact heart of the OP's query to the LLM, and thus nearly none of the broader umbrella 'arms race' is about why the plant doesn't have the evolutionary pressure to actually drive the parasite extinct. An arms race doesn't have to be in equilibrium. Armor vs weapons were in an arms race and indeed at equilibrium for millenia, but then bullets come along and armor goes exinct almost overnight and doesn't reappear for 5 centuries. Bullets win the arms race. Arms races have nothing to do, inherently, with equilibrium.

You seem to have misunderstood the nature of the equilibrium in a Red Queen scenario, which is the fundamental effect that the hypothesis is directly named for. That species that are in Red Queen relationships can go extinct is in no way a counterargument to the idea that two (or more) species tend to coevolve in such a way that the relative fitness of each (and of the system as a whole) stays constant. See, for example, the end of the first paragraph on the origin of Van Valen's term at your own wiki link.

Evolutionary steady-state is a synonymous term without the baggage of the literary reference and also avoids the incorrect connotation suggested by arms race that leads people to forget the abiotic factors that are often a dominant mechanism in extinctions as the realized niche vs the fundamental niche differ. Instead, Van Valen was specifically proposing the Red Queen hypothesis as an explanation of why extinction appears to be a half-life, i.e. of a constant probability, rather than a rate that depends on the lifetime of the taxa. This mechanism has good explanatory power for the strong and consistent evidence that speciation rate (usually considered as the log of the number of genera, depending on definition, see Stanley's Rule) has a direct and linear relation with the extinction rate. If Red Queened species didn't go exinct, Van Valen wouldn't have needed to coin the term to explain this correlation.

Or were you deliberately invoking Cunningham's Law?

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

#417
post #385

I was among the first to champion AI search, even before Perplexity rose to fame. You.com was the first AI search to quote sources well, and I used it extensively. But now, the veracity of most LLMs' responses is terrible. They often include “sources” unrelated to what they say and make up hallucinations when I search for what I'm an expert in. Even Gemini in Google Search told me yesterday that Ada Lovelace invented…

> The trust is completely gone I mean, for everyone else it was never there to begin with. Hallucinations are constantly raised as the biggest issues with AI. According to the tests, and my experience, newer AI models are objectively better, not worse than the ones from a few years ago. They still have a long way to go/may never be fully trustworthy though. What I have lost trust in, and what I and many feel has beco…

I think the old ones were more trustworthy, as the LLM wasn't used for knowledge retrieval. Instead, it wrapped around a search API and summarized the "10 blue links". That's not the case anymore. Now they produce the search results, hallucinating along the way.

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

#419
My native language is Chinese. Most of my colleague use www.baidu.com as search engine. But I do not like baidu, because the search results are full of ADs. I also use ChatGPT or deepseek. But in my work (linux kernel driver portting), the AI is not good enough, I can not believe it totally. So for some case, I still use Google to search answer with keyword in English. If you want to konw why I use English as keywords, because of CSDN,this site has been polluting the internet for far too long.
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