I don't want my search engine to think for me

I left google for chagpt/claude, but have slowly been coming back because these results have become rather useful -- especially when google inspects actual video content to produce replies. This is one of the best outcomes of the AI wave for me: content which was locked away in YouTube videos and forced me to consume it sequentially (without power-reading as I do with articles) is now indexed in search results in some AI summary. It makes mistakes, but it lets me figure out the right videos to watch, and often gives me enough context to find the solution myself. This applies to work, but also to something as simple as game walkthroughs!

As with everything, you need to know when to trust and when to doubt, when to iterate on chat (or chat with it with a smarter assistant like ChatGPT/claude). Hasn't it always been this way (minus the chat)?

I don't understand why people seem to be under this idea that just because it's at the top of a search results page it must be entirely correct, when we have spent decades knowing that you can't trust what's on the internet and you need to have critical thinking. Were you blindly trusting your first-page google results? What about when Wikipedia was starting, were you also trusting it blindly? Do you trust it blindly now?

In fact, when google started stealing the content of websites to display it, wasn't it already producing largely incorrect results because so many hits were SEO-garbage or outdated? (Not that we don't need to address the fact that this steals traffic from websites -- but it's a problem that PREDATES AI and absolutely still needs to be addressed somehow)

I can understand it if they believe the average joe will be more likely to blindly trust this, but that's an education problem -- and one we already had and has perhaps been compounded.

The visceral hate for a a life-changing technology that enables us to do more, faster, never ceases to amaze me. I'm growing so tired of it around my inner circles.

I get that there is a real bubble with real overhype and that some companies are profiting from it and shoving it down everyone's throats. I get that your actual life is worse because of this (you are forced to use shit models to produce more features while being paid the same). I get that maybe your job might change, and that for some people they will actually need to job-hop. This all absolutely sucks and it is a problem for many people, I get that! But that doesn't make the technology as a whole terrible, much less a bunch of its amazing applications. It's this constant wave of negativity, like nothing good will ever come out of AI and we're all doomed to be cornered by the big evil corporations that will run us dry.

It's hard to be rational when you're overcome with emotion and fear, I know, but it's so aggravating to have to interact with someone who can only see the technology itself as negative.

It's up to you, the human, to decide what path you get the information and how to digest it and use it. I use LLMs for 99% of my "querying" these days because 99% of the information I'm looking for is either verifiable (coding) or low-stakes (how to do low-risk DIY house thing).

If I need actual search, I use Kagi. Otherwise, Claude has taken 99.8% of what Google used to do for me and it feels better than ever.