Bad prompts for google can have exactly the same words as good prompts for ChatGPT. The original commenter probably uses both of them at least 10 times a day, so it's not unreasonable to assume that they will run into those examples.
I would typically assume that a three word prompt like that is better for Google than it is for ChatGPT. Google is supposed to be good at keyword search, and ChatGPT is designed for longer prompts.
That means that your prior assumptions about Google are wrong. Google does a substantial amount of "semantic understanding" before doing a search. It is no longer a keyword matching tool - that stopped being the case a long time ago.
Also, ChatGPT is usually really bad with long prompts when I use it, and is often kind of close when I give it a short prompt. I assume part of this effect is psychological though, where you expect the short prompt to have worse results.
"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…
There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site. It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.
The only way to make a better replacement is to make a 100 competing replacements each with substantial market share. They don't even have to be better implemented than Google, getting rid of market dominance alone would improve results because SEO assholes wouldn't have time to optimize for all 100.
No, Google results are trash. Here are three examples from this week: - I Googled "speed work running", wanting some workout suggestions. I visited four or five results that either didn't have concrete suggestions, were poorly written, or overly verbose. I ended my search with little faith that I was getting good advice. I typed the same thing into ChatGPT and got a suggestion of 6 different workouts that all seemed…
While reading your Google examples, I don’t think I could parse out what you were intending as a human. Perhaps different keywords would work better? For example, “speed work running”, were you looking to improve sprinting? (I’m not a runner, so it almost reads to me like “working fast while on a treadmill”). Reading the rest of your example, maybe “sprint workouts” would give better results? (40+yr old guy here, Goo…
Mid-30s here, everyone in the shop at work uses me for Google because I still know how to use it effectively. Speaking with lots of people in person and via chats/forums has gradually made me come to realize how refined my search abilities are, relatively speaking. I think it's a combination of factors, like you mentioned "finding the right, specific enough set of keywords" is intuitive for us, but a lot of people just type in questions like it's Ask Jeeves from decades ago. Another major factor is one of grammar and vocabulary, because Google will fuzz your search string. In my experience, its "thesaurus" will rarely add more technical or specific words, so including them in your search will often give you actual technical data from a given field. Of course, this only helps if you have the proper lexicon to begin with, which was my main use case for Reddit before it went to shit. Hobbyist or technical subreddits were great for drilling down and winnowing out the specific name of something I was trying to find more information about. Now it's just more SEO LLM-generated nonsense trying to sell me crap I don't need. The other "secret sauce" I use when Googling is search operators, but we actually learned about those in elementary school (before Google existed!).
The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.
The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.
Not quite. I think "surfing the web" has become a worse experience now than in the past. There are some "internet connected" experiences such as Wikipedia which work well. But the biggest change is that the internet has moved away from being an exploration space to a push content space. The hyperlinking got reduced because tech companies didn't want people to leave their platform and that just made the culture very pushy and clingy.
The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.
This perhaps, is some rose colored glasses. I remember friends getting harassed online, where it was one of the few places they could be themselves (for instance, a good friend of mine was openly gay online well before he was in person) and the internet seemingly didn't take kindly to this in alot of corners (gaming for starters) That said, they were able to find some community that didn't exist the same locally, so…
Absolutely. As a homosexual or transgender you would be ripped apart online. But you also strangely learnt to fight back and stand for yourself. It was easier because you were anonymous and you were not always online.
If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.
I've never really found docs particularly useful. Usually, I just want a few simple examples to get the gist of how something works and docs tend to be very bad job of that. Meanwhile, the W3Schools SEO spam HN disdains tends to good job of that. These days I use ChatGPT though.
> These days I use ChatGPT though.
I usually get non-working code snippets that pass the wrong parameters.
I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…
DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.
If you call "working" showing me an endless stream of blogs of some dude, an automatically translated russian clone of stackoverflow, a completely unrelated stackoverflow question, above the actual official documentation that it should be showing me… sure then it works.
I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.
My suspicion is that blogs have ads and documentation doesn't, and that's why the results are like this.
I bet more people are looking for blogs than docs.
My suspicion is that blogs have ads and documentation doesn't, and that's why the results are like this.
Totally agree! My point is that they both probably contain the same answer and I bet that's all most people care about. I think most of us here have strong preferences for picking the "most appropriate" source, but frankly, I suspect we're weird.
I cant foresee a scenario where an endlessly growing mass of AI-generated noise, stacked upon itself, will be useful to anyone. Humans will invariably find a less contentious path (maybe its seeking out more localized options, maybe its balkanizing into various specialized domains, maybe its $NEWTHINGYETTOBESEEN, or all of the above. But the current trajectory cannot hold. Someone else mentioned the "reverse-takeover…
People keep saying the Internet is going to be flooded by AI-generated content. Is it going to be any different than the million Wikipedia/StackOverflow re-skins? A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results? Generative AI can also increase the amount of good content, too. If I knew that a particular human vouched for an AI-generated code snippet, I would trust it as much as a hand-written StackOve…
" A bunch of trash sites we learn to ignore in our search results?" Exactly. But when/if that stack shifts the signal to noise ratio at escape velocity into a toilet, behaviors will change.
I'm just curious as to what that might look like. We've already seen plenty of examples as to what folks will do when an online option becomes sour/untenable...new ones arrive. Sometimes they look like old options repackaged. Sometimes they are radically new.