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Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
71–80 of 609 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#72Yes. Why would I use AI to find information?
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#73Yes, LLMs are no match for my decades of search skills.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#74Search has gotten so bad I have replaced like 80% of it with LLMs, typically Claude or Gemini. I've also switched my searches over to duckduckgo whenever I do end up searching for something but even that is on the bad side.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#75Why would I ever search on a ChatGPT - thats not what they are for. They are for helping summarize things, writing copy, designing excel. Making silly images.
Search is for finding specific websites and products. Totally different things.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#76Yes, I'm still using Google as I haven't found LLMs useful as a search engine replacement.
but the AI responses from google that dominate the screen real estate are terrible. When you repeat the exact same query and get changing (but all wrong) answers, something is broken. I've resorted to including profanity in all my searches to prevent the AI responses, which is suboptimal at work...
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#77I use DuckDuckGo, with the occasional reddit !g appended if I'm looking for something experience-based. For me, searches fall into one of three categories, none of which are a good fit for LLMs: 1. A single business, location, object, or concept (I really just want the Google Maps or Wikipedia page, and I'm too lazy to go straight to the site). For these queries, LLMs are either overkill or outdated. 2. Product revie…
In response to the final sentence, you can work around this by breaking your problem or question down into smaller pieces. Essentially forcing it to reason, manually.
You can but that is incredibly slow for me compared to a search term.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#78Yup. I want to see a variety of sources, evaluate them, and understand the answer.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Why would you even search for that out of the context of the IDE where you're coding or writing documentation? If you're writing bash you'd have all those man pages loaded in context for it to answer questions and generate code properly.
>you'd have all those man pages loaded in context for it to answer
Or I can just go to DDG/Google, and be done with it. No need to pre-load my "search engine" with context to get results.
Re: Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
#80I use Kagi and I don't think I'd notice if quick answer disappeared. Most of the time I have an answer in the time it would take for GPT to present a prompt.