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Google doesn't work anymore ?

What's your opinion? Does google really "not work" anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it's own way i feel...

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  • I have been using AI chat exclusively for searching for at least the past 3 days.

    It is so much better in every possible way for simple factual questions, especially ChatGPT and Google Bard. Great for shopping. Microsoft Bing is okay, but you have to choose the right personality.

    Sidenote: I KNOW using Google, and the other companies I will mention, is the antithesis of freedom and privacy. Yet, they are incredibly powerful tools that are getting implemented everywhere, so my curiousity has led me down an honestly fun rabbit hole.

    The other AI that really surpised me is Opera Aria. Like Bing, it is using ChatGPT-4 and integrating real-time information. It just feels smarter, or perhaps more professional?

    The caveat with all these except maybe Bard which, uses its own system, are very good at shutting down questions it does not want to answer. It feels weird and wrong when it happens, like it just saved you from asking something immoral, or at least too many questions about the tech.

    Strange experience overall.


    TL;DR AI chatbots are great at parsing the internet to get you answers with reasonable accuracy and relevancy when old-fashioned search can be tedious or fruitless.

    • Bing and Google Bard keep disappointing me. Bing for some reason only picks up on half of what I ask. Which is extremely odd as it is supposedly is ChatGPT based and ChatGPT gives pretty good answers on the same queries. The only problem with the latter is that a lot of it is of course outdated.

      Bard might just be broken for me. I keep getting I'm a text-based AI, and that is outside of my capabilities. or similar responses.

      • I get that too drom Bard sometimes, but it is for specific queries. I think the key is working on the prompt until it gets it. Sometimes you need to start over with a new chat.

        Bing does not work like ChatGPT despite having the same base, even in creative mode. No idea why. However I like creative mode when I don't just dont want to see links embedded. I also love taking advantage of free Dall-E.

        Bard is great for anything that can be put into a list or chart, like comparisons. Literally put in a chart.

        I am dissapointed in that I have not been able to get a single mathematic equation produced (like famous ones), but I know they can?

        If you get the chance and willing to download a full ass browser, Opera has Aria, which is like the cleanest version of ChatGPT I have seen. Just the formatted answers with hyperlinks are worth it. It is good. It is hard to explain, but Aria mostly just works. It is closer to Bard in responses, and does what you want out of Bing without messing with convo styles.

        Whatever prompts that Bing put for the convo style may be messing with the results.

        All things said, I switch between them often, depending on my needs. It takes some time but I have built my intuition of which one will give the best response for the prompt, but I often just search the prompt in all of them.

        Anyways, I hope you find more success using them!

        • I am dissapointed in that I have not been able to get a single mathematic equation produced (like famous ones), but I know they can?

          Well, my understanding is that they actually can't. LLM's do "language" mostly based on what is called "next word prediction" so they basically look at the word and predict what the next most logical word would be. (Somewhat simplified). So numbers to them are not numbers but words, which is why they are fairly bad at them.

          Opera has Aria, which is like the cleanest version of ChatGPT

          Pass, not sure what stake the chinese owners have these days but Opera is a bit too.... feature rich in everything.

          I do like working with just chat.openai.com for simple stuff. It is great at helping my debug things in areas I don't quite have all the knowledge I'd like. For example, I had to work on a shell script earlier in bash. Something I don't do often and as an added bonus it needed to work on both macOS machines and the bash version shipped with "git bash" on windows. MacOS GNU utils already function slightly differently at times, but git bash on windows is entirely broken in some areas. Where yesterday I spend an hour trying to find something relevant based on my input and the error I got through google chatGPT just managed to point out the pain point right away.

          And that is where I feel chatGPT (in this case anyway) does a great job, troubleshooting issues about things that are not necessarily bleeding edge. I just presented it with a clear problem and a bit of context and asked why that could be the case. It also got it wrong a few times, but that is fine, it did safe me a bunch of time in the end.

      • For tech stuff try phind.com

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