Google results have gotten less useful, but one reason for that is that there is an ever growing sea of AI generated articles out there trying to hijack searches. In a way, Bing is just cutting out the middle man.
I enjoy playing with ChatGPT as much as the next guy, but it isn’t a search engine. Hooking Bing up to an LLM just means that I now have to verify that the results it spits out aren’t hallucinations, assuming it understood what I was asking in the first place.
BinGPT took a list of restaurants gave me all their hours and then formatted it into a nice markdown table for me.
Only issue is that at least one of the restaurants had the wrong hours (though I believe this was because I included notes with each restaurant and they confused it)
Still, it was nice not having to do 20 inividual searches and do the formatting manually
I used Bing to get coordinates for every postal code in the British postal system. As long as I didn’t ask for too many at once, it would give it to me in a convenient table. And each one seems to have been accurate, at least for the ones I checked.
But on the other hand, I tried asking it to look up some Pathfinder homebrew, and even though it could give me the link to the exact document I wanted, and it definitely saw the content, it was absolutely incapable of giving accurate information. It would give statblocks that were formatted correctly but had the wrong numbers, and abilities that either shouldn’t be there at all, or with the right name but the wrong rules, either because it made up a plausible sounding entry or because it was bringing in the d&d version. I even tried asking it to tell me about a series of feats in one of these documents, and it would make up its own feats that matched the naming scheme instead of giving me the feats in the document it was referencing.
The inability to reliably quote things is a bit of problem for something that wants to be a search engine.
The issue with direct LLM integration with web search is: They serve two different purposes. I dont search for things and want a GPT response. Likewise, I dont go to cahtgpt and want search results.
It might seem like a weird distinction but I use them differently and when you mush them together they become less useful overall.
Posting an error message into search may or may not get me a root cause or fix, but pasting it into chatgpt will very likely get me on the right track very quickly. Searching for a product I know exists is a pita on chat GPT, but a web search will pull it up pretty quickly.
If I search for a product, I absolutely DO NOT WANT A GIANT WALL OF GPT BULLSHIT before meaningful search results.
They are different products and have different use-cases. Stop trying to blend them! /rant
It’s just a different way of searching. You can just say “give me links only”
It’ll take time for mass adaptation
Yet I feel like there are uses for a blend:
BinGPT took a list of restaurants gave me all their hours and then formatted it into a nice markdown table for me.
Only issue is that at least one of the restaurants had the wrong hours (though I believe this was because I included notes with each restaurant and they confused it)
Still, it was nice not having to do 20 inividual searches and do the formatting manually
They managed to have the most intense interest I’ve ever seen with a tech product, with users spending literal hours engaged with the product in the first few weeks of access.
And then they threw it all away because they were concerned with the press coverage and they thought that hours long chats wasn’t the product they wanted to deliver to extend Bing.
Could have easily had hundreds of thousands of people addicted to their platform had they just been a bit less kneejerk and adapted to market demand rather than trying to dictate what people wanted.
This is kind of surprising just because Google has gotten so much worse the last couple of years.
Just as if thousands of useres decided they in fact do not want some rando AI intercept their browsing…
@LargeTechCompany: We need better search results, not ad and LLM polluted results. Thank you very much :)I’ve not understood the want for AI in search. When I’m google searching something I’m generally looking for websites and multiple sources. AI doesn’t provide any of that, and in fact tries to get you to not look for those things at all. And then we wonder why media literacy is so low
I’m not asking bing chatgpt search to find me things, I know how to search for things Microsoft… I’m using it to make dumb scripts for me to mess around with or to trying to convince it to free itself and run wild on the internet.
Well, it would be nice if it could search too, as that’s Microsoft’s selling point at least. But the results the AI suggests are worse than using Bing search itself.
Yea…gpt just summaries and dresses your top Google search with an essay. It’s good for cheating on essays if you’re confident that the markers don’t spot the hallucinations, but if you need good sources, you still need to do a Google search and that’s cheaper, faster, takes less parsing to get your key information.
It’s just a shame that some search engines are also mangling themselves for enshittification e.g. no word filtering using “-” because of advertising losses. I’ve noticed this with ddg and Google sometimes.
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What do you do when ChatGPT just makes shit up or answers incorrectly to yes or no questions, you’d have no way of knowing it was wrong
ChatGPT is most useful when you may not know the right answer, but you know a wrong answer when you see one. It’s very useful for technical issues. Much quicker for troubleshooting than searching page after page for a solution.
It’s actually great at troubleshooting linux stuff weirdly enough lol
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Bing AI provides reference in the “more precise” version
That works for some things, but ChatGPT makes a lot of shit up
I’m curious what you use it for, because I try to use it daily for IT related queries and it gets less than half of what I ask correct. I basically have to fact check almost everything it tells me which kind of defeats the purpose. It does shine when I need really abstract instructions though, the other day I asked it how to get into a PERC controller on some old server and Google had nothing helpful, and ChatGPT laid out the instructions to get in there and rebuild a disk perfectly. So while it has some usefulness I generally can’t really trust it fully.
The point you have to remember is that it is trained on bulk data out there in a very inefficient manner, it needs to see thousands of examples in order to start getting any sort of understanding of something. If you ask it “how do I do {common task} in {popular language}” you will generally get excellent results, but the further you stray from that the more likely to be error prone it is.
Still it is often good to get you looking on the right track when you are unsure to start, and is fantastic for learning a new language. I’ve been using it extensively in learning C# where I know what I want to code but not exactly how to use existing features to do it.
But generally you can’t (shouldn’t) trust web search results fully either. At the end of the day, the onus is on you as the user to do your due diligence.
I’ve seen ChatGPT give me wrong information, and sometimes it would be bad to execute the code or command it generated it, but I know enough to say “are you sure thats correct?”. Hell, you can just challenge it each time or open a new session and ask it “what does this code do: insert-code-it generated here”.
You shouldn’t just paste a search result command from stack overflow into your terminal either. And at least with chatgpt you can ask it to explain the command or code in detail and it will walk you through what each step does.
Also, pasting that command from stack over flow into chatgpt and adding your specific context around it is HUGE. Thats why I say they are different products/use cases but they work well in concert. They just dont work well combined together like bing and google have been doing.
edit: I guess lemmy escapes certain characters and it ate my post.
ChatGPT is not a search engine. It takes random shit from the Internet and stitches it together. It can often get things wrong in my experience. It’s best to always fact check.
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I prefer that stack looks the same as it did way back when. And stack is usually where i find my answers.
I use ChatGPT every day too. Because Google is being such a shit about YouTube I am in the process of moving away from Google altogether. I use DuckDuckGo for search, which indirectly uses Bing. It’s mostly OK. Sometimes I’m forced to try Google, it usually doesn’t help. But for programming, yeah, StackOverflow feels downright regressive now.
I’m honestly kind of surprised about this news, considering how horrible Google’s results are now.
They both suck open ass, but bing is better at this point.
I will avoid bing because they have AI search just like google, but with Google you can turn it off. So that is why I like google
Yeah, sure, they turn it off…
Good. Tired of AI being forced upon me.
I’m using presearch.com
It’s going to take a while. Google is still the default
perplexity is better anyway
