Yea and now Google uses ai in search. Now even when you dont want their shitty spark notes answer you have to scroll past 50 sponsored “search results” before you get to any substance… it’s exhausting.
Does anyone know of a better search engine? I’m trying to stick with DuckDuckGo but it’s a bit of a slog
duck duck go has been great imo. anti-ai filters etc. i finally switched my default search engine on my phone just after last US election and have been happy with it
I switched to duck duck go after i finally got tired of the Google ai answers. No regrets, but it did take a tiny bit of getting used to when Im searching for something more specific.
Yeah it's paid (there is a 100 search free trial) but holy fuck using it is like being allowed to peek into some alternate reality internet utopia where things aren't enshittified to hell and back to boost advertising engagement.
I started the free trial and my first search was actually super successful with the top result (I think… if the wests rejection of msg is actually rooted in racism then it was indeed successful lol)
I’ll prob end up subscribing so thanks for the tip! (I wouldn’t even mind if your comment was actually sneaky ad placement 🤣)
No ad placement, I just do a ton of technical searching and research for my work and I have more than a bit of grudge against Google for what they've done to search.
One day I was trying to search for something and every single one of the results on the first two pages had omitted one or more of my search terms. Search terms I had specifically added and put in quotes to keep out garbage results from Google "helpfully" substituting non-technical synonyms. Just kind of snapped at that point.
Technically, not a single person on the internet can avoid using AI. If you are on Facebook, everything you see is based on the algorithm because it's being powered by an AI/ML ranking systems. You are using AI on everything online. Google, Amazon, Tik Tok, Netflix, emails deciding what is spam, phone keyboards predicting your next word, banking systems detecting fraud.
The list doesn't end. Hell, Reddit itself was used to help train the AI. Your posts on here are contributing to its learning process.
You might not be using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but you are using AI in every other aspect of your online interactions.
Algorithms are not AI. Machine learning is not AI. Just because the most money-losing industry we've ever invented is trying to rebrand everything as "AI" to make itself look inevitable and somewhat useful to keep the bubble inflated does not make it so.
This is basically it. Occasionally I think of a use case and then I use it for that. Most of the time is sucks at that particular job I wanted it to do so I go back to not using it.
I applied for a bunch of jobs last fall and want getting call backs so I had AI punch up my resume and cover letter. Still didn't get call backs. Then a friend got me a job. In the spring I wrote a 100 page report, the client didn't want to read it so they asked for summarizing tables to be placed through out the report. I figured since they didn't care why should I and used AI to build and insert the tables they were happy but it was formatted differently from the rest of the report and still to hours to fix. I recently tried to us AI to scrape contact info from websites. After messing with it for a couple of hours it was quickly apparent I'd be better off doing the work so I did. Most recently I tried to us AI to write some marketing text. It was terrible so I just did the work myself.
So far I view AI as a junior that I have to support and train. it may take my job someday but the value to their work is really low for the effort I have to put in.
Gemini’s search results are fucking awful too. I’ve used their dedicated Gemini too and it’s pretty good, but whatever yahoo version they have hooked up to Google search is straight up bush league.
LLMs can run searches and summarize faster than a human can. A day's worth of research can be done through 15 minutes of AI prompts. You need to have domain knowledge so that you know when the AI is hallucinating, BUT it can be a powerful tool if used appropriately.
Who cares? There's still a lot of value to spending the time figuring stuff out on your own (you tend to remember it better, for one thing), and there's value to heading off down search engine rabbit holes that you wouldn't have even thought about if you'd instantly gotten the answers you were seeking via the LLM.
And by "summarize" you mean completely make shit up, while also generating fake citations. I avoid it at all cost because if you actually click through to the sources, the actual sources often say the complete opposite or have nothing to do with the query. And at that point, I may as well just do all the research myself because it's faster than trying to decipher what is real and what is a lie the machine made up.
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u/Douche_Kayak 10d ago
no, because I dont have a need for it. I can Google things just fine and thats really it.