What search engine do you use?

Leigh@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 48 points –

Data on search engine market share is available, but I wonder what that looks like for Lemmy users in particular, who I would assume lean more technical than the average user, so probably use DuckDuckGo and alternates more than Google.

I use a mix of DuckDuckGo and Kagi. I'll also use ChatGPT, which can be good if you're careful to verify the answers it gives you as a check against hallucinations. It's useful for short, direct answers without ads or SEO bullshit.

This article on Ars (and if you're not a subscriber, you absolutely should be, as they are the best tech journalists out there) inspired the question: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/google-admits-reddit-protests-make-it-harder-to-find-helpful-search-results

Fucking Reddit. Enshittification ruins everything.

116

You are viewing a single comment

Except it IS a search engine and that's basically all it's good for. By its very nature all it can do is collate information. It's the only thing AI is good at.

No it's not. To search is a specific task, and generative AI can't do that. It can fulfill some need that we are used to fulfill by searching the web, but this doesn't mean it's a search engine.

If you lost the key of your car and have access to an AI that can (sometimes) start your can without a key, you can be happy about it, but you still can't say the AI searched the key for you. It can't do it.

Edit: btw, we are talking about generative AI here. I'm not saying there isn't and could not be a search engine that use AI to better its result.

You sound like you're desperately trying to play a losing semantic game.

https://blogs.bing.com/search/march\_2023/Confirmed-the-new-Bing-runs-on-OpenAI%E2%80%99s-GPT-4

Fuck off.

Why do you have to answer like that?

You are linking a search engine based on generative AI, which is a different things than using chatgpt per sè and, as I was saying to another user, I did not know existed.

If you don't like my answer you can simply not comment on that. I don't care if you agree with me or not, be polite

Don't worry, you are in the right: a LLM is not a search engine. You might integrate it into a search engine, but that doesn't make it a search engine.

I mean it's so glaringly obvious it is not a search engine: every time you ask ChatGPT for information it will give you a disclaimer it's database is from 2021 and prior...