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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?

#571

Post by tasuki »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #273
wavemode wrote: post #69

Search 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…

I'd go further, and say I use search when I'm pretty confident I know the right search terms. If I don't, I'll type some wordy long explanation of what I want into an LLM and hope for the best. The reason is pretty simple. If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you…

> I'll type some wordy long explanation of what I want into an LLM and hope for the best.

Interesting, I just random words. LLM not care sentence.

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

#572

Post by tasuki »

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…

> I use Kagi exclusively and refuse to offload my brain to a thing which has no accuracy guarantee ever.

What a weird sentence. What accuracy guarantees does Kagi have? Or, if you're not "offloading your brain to it", can't you do the same with an LLM?

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

#573

Post by bayindirh »

tasuki wrote: post #572
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…

> I use Kagi exclusively and refuse to offload my brain to a thing which has no accuracy guarantee ever. What a weird sentence. What accuracy guarantees does Kagi have? Or, if you're not "offloading your brain to it", can't you do the same with an LLM?

Kagi is a search engine, which is developing its own index, and use the other indexes to give a more comprehendsive result if their own index doesn't fulfill the query you made.

Moreover, Kagi is a paid service. It has no ads, no hidden ranking, nothing to earn money by manipulating you. On the contrary you, the user, can add filters and ranking modifiers to promote the sites you find to be useful/truthful and demote others which push slop and SEO optimized content to your eyeballs. This is per user, and is not meddled with.

This makes Kagi very deterministic (unlike LLMs), very controllable (unlike LLMs), and very personalized (unlike LLMs). Moreover, Kagi gives you ~20 results or so per search, and no fillers (again, unlike LLMs).

I don't use Kagi's AI assistance features, and I don't pay for the "assistant" part of it, either.

I don't offload my brain to Kagi, because I don't prompt it until it gives me something I like. Instead, I get the results, read them, learn what I'm looking for, and possibly document what I got out from that research. This usage pattern, is again very different than prompting an LLM until it gives you something somewhat works or sounds plausible.

I do the hard work of synthesizing and understanding the answer. Not reading some slop and accepting it at face value.

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

#574

Post by nickpsecurity »

Hard_Space wrote: post #477
atonse wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re using ChatGPT, add it to your memory so it always remembers that you prefer that.

No matter how many times I get ChatGPT to write my rules to long-term memory (I checked, and multiple rules exist in LTM multiple times), it inevitably forgets some or all of the rules because after a while, it can only see what's right in front of it, and not (what should be) the defining schema that you might provide.

I haven't used ChatGPT in a while. I used to run into a problem that sounds similar. If you're talking about:

1. Rules that get prefixed in front of your prompt as part of the real prompt ChatGPT gets. Like what they do with the system prompt.

And

2. Some content makes your prompt too big for the context windows where the rules get cut off.

Then, it might help to measure the tokens in the overall prompt, have a max number, and warn if it goes over it. I had a custom, chat app that used their API's with this feature built in.

Another possibility is, when this is detected, it asks you if you want to use one with a larger, context window. Those cost more. So, it would be presented as an option. My app let me select any of their models to do that manually.

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

#575

Post by saltcured »

smallerize wrote: post #533
saltcured wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sources will start to be redundant eventually. It's actually O(1) once you have looked at all the sources... that there are... in the world. Trivial!

I'm not sure. In this context, sources are utterances rather than speakers. So they're only finite if we limit ourselves to a snapshot of past utterances while doing our checking.

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

#576

Post by thefz »

Koshcheiushko wrote: post #96
thefz wrote: post #73

Yes, 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.

Mainly knowing what to search for, and a neural engine for bullshit filtering. The engine is me.

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

#577

Post by bmcahren »

wavemode wrote: post #69

Search 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…

I am going to cite you in a decade. Already today ChatGPT is _far_ better than Google. Instead of finding a keyword optimized page for "frob language", I can get the objectively best sources for frob language and even find the best communities related to it. Zero frob ads, zero frob-optimized pages that are designed to trick google, etc.

Traditional search is dead, semantic search through AI is alive and well.

I can't yet count once AI misunderstood the meaning of my search while Google loves to make assumptions, rewrite my search query, and deliver the results that pay it the best which have the best ads (in my opinion as a lifetime user).

Lets not even mention how they willingly accept misleading ads atop the results which trick the majority of common users into downloading malware and adware on the regular.

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

#578

Post by tasuki »

bayindirh wrote: post #573
tasuki wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use Kagi exclusively and refuse to offload my brain to a thing which has no accuracy guarantee ever. What a weird sentence. What accuracy guarantees does Kagi have? Or, if you're not "offloading your brain to it", can't you do the same with an LLM?

Kagi is a search engine, which is developing its own index, and use the other indexes to give a more comprehendsive result if their own index doesn't fulfill the query you made. Moreover, Kagi is a paid service. It has no ads, no hidden ranking, nothing to earn money by manipulating you. On the contrary you , the user, can add filters and ranking modifiers to promote the sites you find to be useful/truthful and demot…

> I don't offload my brain to Kagi, because I don't prompt it until it gives me something I like.

Similarly, I don't offload my brain to LLMs.

> I do the hard work of synthesizing and understanding the answer. Not reading some slop and accepting it at face value.

Again, it's not necessary to accept LLM output at face value.

Use tools, think for yourself, sure. This applies to various tools: Kagi, LLMs, and others. None of these give you "accuracy guarantees". You usually have to think for yourself.

My favourite example of a situation where you don't have to think for yourself is asking an LLM to implement a function in a very strongly typed language. There only is one implementation of `a -> a`. For `(a -> b) -> List a -> List b`, you could return an empty list instead of performing map. There aren't that many implementations of `(a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b` (three as far as I can see: left/right fold and a function which just returns the accumulator). It's easier to verify the LLM solution than to implement it yourself!

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

#579

Post by ern »

tofof wrote: post #372
Modified3019 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO an example of a good use case for an LLM, which would be otherwise very hard to search for, is clarifying vague technical concepts. Just yesterday I was trying to remember the name of a vague concept I’d forgotten, with my overall question being: “Is there a technical term in biology for the equilibrium that occurs between plant species producing defensive toxins, and toxin resistance in the insect species that f…

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…

I tested that prompt with multiple chatGPT models, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Deepseek and all mentioned the red queen. Just saying.

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

#580

Post by dbmnt »

subsection1h wrote: post #24
jrvarela56 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say come back in a few years for a bad take. But this is already a bad take. A query in a regular search engine can at best perform like an LLM-based provider like Perplexity for simple queries. If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.

> If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources. I just searched for "What is inherit_errexit?" at Perplexity. Eight sources were provided and none of them were the most authoritative source, which is this page in the Bash manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt... Whereas, when I searched for "inherit_errexit" using Googl…

In the last paragraph you describe the overwhelming majority of humanity, seemingly without any sense of irony. What outcome do you expect here?
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