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OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#221

Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want. Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a se…

Google results are trash compared to years ago but better than bing trash now

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#222

Sad day for me. Bing actually gives you points to search on their engine. I just cashed in a bunch of points for a $100 gift card. My guess is this program will go away if Bing becomes more popular.

What the rate for you? Because for me its 15k points for 10 USD.

I had over 100k points lol.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is a big part of the issue. Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back. Sometimes you benefit from that, other times it pushes the results you want way down. I just tested this and there were some micropython related results in the top ten, but the majority were for beautiful soup with no mention of micropython.

> Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back. There could also be other things that make it non-reproducible as well. It sometimes feels like search just returns whatever it has on hand that seems somewhat similar to your search. It may then do an asynchronous request to pull into cache results from a deeper backend search, but by the time the…

That sounds plausible. There could be some service aggregating search results from multiple systems, and if one of them is slow (maybe breaking some SLA), it would be omitted.

I guess there are probably a hundred Google employees reading this who know whether it’s accurate and we’re just speculating.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not since Google results became such garbage. Plus, the chats provide references. So easy to verify.

I love that Bing Chat actually links to references. It felt like something was missing from ChatGPT without it.

If I have to check each reference, what's the added value compared to just giving me a list of links (i.e. a good old search engine)?

Chat search tools are only useful if (when?) they achieve a 99.99% reliability (I'm fine with one mistake per 1000 searches).

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#225

Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want. Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a se…

It's absurd how Google will simply ignore the keywords in my search to feed me whatever it's trash algorithm decided fits my search. And the decline in Google Maps has been shocking. Maps has gone from always reliable to being "trust it if you like wasting time and burning fuel" bad. I don't know what the hell happened at Google, but it ain't pretty.

It’s even worse. I’ve been using ChatGPT a lot in situations that’d be Google searches before and I love how you can fill in so much detail and it will actually provide you with better results. With Google, additional detail is actually used against you. With enough keywords, it will match just about any site to your query.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#226

Maybe because Google is actual trash and it went from being the best search engine to being an SEO-infested desert of a search, where your query is interpreted however they want not how you want. Latest example from today - search for "micropython html parser" - 100% of results are about normal python not micropython, with the first 4 results being for generic paid programming courses. It's completely useless as a se…

To be fair, you could always surround micropython in quotes so that Google knows to only show results containing the keyword "micropython". Only caveat is that Google will still show you whatever it wants in case no results contain the keyword. I swear a decade ago it would simply tell you no results were found, but now you need to (1) use quotes in keywords, and (2) click on "show only results containing [keyword]" when it can't find any results yet decides to show you unrelated pages anyway.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#227
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you for real ? I mean, pick better examples if you want to poke something, since: Search for "micropython html parser" gets you https://pypi.org/project/micropython-html.parser/ as the first result with the quote: "This is a module ported from CPython standard library to be compatible with MicroPython interpreter."

Not for me. That website isn't anywhere on the first page of results.

First result for me too

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is a big part of the issue. Of course the issue isn't reproducible; Google is trying to do the search based on their model of what you want back. Sometimes you benefit from that, other times it pushes the results you want way down. I just tested this and there were some micropython related results in the top ten, but the majority were for beautiful soup with no mention of micropython.

I often find that frustrating about Google search, but I'm also unconvinced it's a problem that a more-AI-driven approach will avoid. Seems like the idea to try to convince the model to interpret things differently based on user history is still likely to get pushed by product managers, and still technically capable. And then "no tell me about the framework" "conversationally" vs tailoring Google search terms seems a…

I'm about 80% sure that the reason why Google became so bad for my searches is that they added AI elements to it, to make it try to figure out what I'm searching for instead of taking my word for it.

In that sense, I'm not sure more AI would improve the situation. OTOH, better AI just might. There doesn't seem to be a "no AI" option on offer.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment thread is now #6 and #7 for me

Freshdocs is incredible. A lot of people are stuck in the old mental model where Google released a new index every month.

That's actually super impressive. So there's basically no "index" anymore, in the sense that the results returned are almost "dynamically" generated? And I'd guess that all of that still needs to be pretty cheap, computationally speaking.

Re: OpenAI tech gives Microsoft's Bing a boost in search battle with Google

#230
I love this (even though I have ~25% of my net worth in $GOOG).

Google got fat and lazy. They focused inwards, on promo driven development and executive infighting. This was awful for the tech ecosystem as Google was held out for a long time as the company to emulate.

No longer.

They’re gonna be forced to actually compete: for talent, for users, for mindshare.

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