341–350 of 427 posts
Yesterday my wife mentioned she was looking for a book with a summary of Hong Kong history. I asked ChatGPT and it spit out a list of 5 books, authors, and short descriptions. Like much of ChatGPT's output, it appeared authoritative but was complete bunk. The books weren't real. The authors were names of real people, and in some cases actual scholars. But the list was useless.
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They had a feature to block domains from search results in the past (like, 10 years ago). It was removed. I don't know why, but it feels like exactly the kind of feature that sounds great on paper but doesn't actually survive contact with real users. First, I'd bet that very few people are actually interested in doing that kind of manual curation or engaging with power user features. How large a % of users need to in…
I'm not trying to block domains from my search results because I'm afraid of spam. Google does a pretty good job of not putting spam in my search results. I'm trying to block particular domains because I know the websites hosted on them are utter garbage, and better alternatives containing the same information exist.
ChatGPT is already chipping away at my Google searches. I'm more and more just starting there for coding related questions. I've had chatgpt help me with the following just this week among other things. - solved a complex issue with scaling and transformations using pixijs upon providing a code example. The solution was 99% there and saved me hours of debugging. - refactored JavaScript to the async/await pattern - si…
It supplied this :
// Parse the Diameter header
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(message);
int version = buffer.get() & 0xff;
int flags = buffer.get() & 0xff;
int length = buffer.getShort() & 0xffff;
That's 3 sneaky bugs in 4 lines of code, and it didn't even try to parse the rest of the header.
I'm impressed that it produces _anything_, but it's dangerous to trust.
ChatGPT is as reliable a source as any friend in a pub after 3 beers. It is definite in its answer, convincing with its phrasing and more than likely misremembering something it overheard on the radio while driving to work.
When I tried re-prompting, it produced more complicated, just as incorrect code.
What I am not so sure about, is this really the majority of searches? I assume a big part of searching is about discovery — finding articles, products, images, etc.
For that, you need a good ranking and efficient crawling. Two things ChatGPT doesn't have.
Given the strong brand of Google, only time will tell if ChatGPT will eat a large chunk of Google's market share.
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I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academi…
"I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine" I dont like the idea of linking my search queries with credit card.
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I will. As a Kagi user I loved the quality and authenticity of search results but couldn't justify paying $10 / month for it. In my view that is far too expensive for something I can get for free from Google/DDG with concessions.
Fundamentally there are only two business models available for search. Since searching the vastness of the web in under 500ms is not free, it is either the user paying for that, or a 3rd party (usually advertisers) paying on the behalf of the user. We (Kagi) thought that for something as intimate as search the latter made no sense, hence the birth of paid search business model where incentives between the user and se…
In a large language model you can refine your original request via conversation. In a search engine you tend to rewrite your query to refine it.
LLM conversation is much more stateful than an almost stateless query to a search engine.
However a search engine shows you more than one answer.
With LLMs you can't easily add knowledge graph style facts (subject predicate object). I has either memorized a fact from the training set or not and you can't easily insert one more fact in there. retaining LLMs is not cheap by the way.
An ideal search engine for me is conversational, up to date and one that gives you multiple answers.
For me, Google Search just doesn't seem to be getting better over the years, if anything its getting worse. I honestly feel like its hard to get what I want half the time with all the SEO spam, most of the time I have to input "inurl:reddit.com" just to get good results. At the same time, ChatGPT has frequently impressed me, not with everything (my expectations are reasonably low) but it has performed amazing work fo…
I know this thread is about ChatGPT, but if you're still using Google then I suggest giving Kagi a try. It's a paid search engine, but I've been using it for quite a while now and really enjoy it. With Kagi you can rank and downrank domains as well as block them. There's also this think called "lenses" which are basically filters for specific kinds of searches. For instance, I have a "Programming" lens and a "Academi…
This is a killer feature and I don't understand why ddg and Google don't do it. Google doesn't even have to respect that list for ads. Just give me a way to remove all results from domain X, Y and Z. There are already extensions which do that, but I can't use them on my mobile. It would improve my Google satisfaction massively since it's normally the same blogspam that I run into.