If only Google had a working search engine before AI
And yet it’s still garbage…like their search
With adblock enabled I feel like their results are often better than for example Duckduckgo. I recently switched to using DDG as my standard search engine but I regularly find myself using Google instead to get the results I’m looking for.
Interesting, I’m actually the exact opposite. I always start with Google, because it’s usually good enough, but whenever it takes 2-3 tries to get something relevant, I switch to ddg and get it first try.
My issue is mostly with image search results. DDG’s images tend to be less relevant than Google’s. DDG also lacks “smart” results (idk the official term).
For example when you search “rng 25” on Google, it will immediately present you with a random number between 1 and 25. On DDG you have to click on one of the search results and then use some website to generate the number.
Or when searching for the results of a soccer game, Google will immediately present all the stats to you, while on DDG you will only find some articles about it.
Of course it really depends on the kind of search and I’m sure DDG will regularly have better results than Google too.
One example I had with DDG image search was transparent electronics, I couldnt find a way to get electronics with a transparent case, DDG would only give me generic electronics images that had transparency. Google got it though
Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.
The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.
And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.
The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.
Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?
I build AI for a living, and I can tell you that generative AI is a crock of shit.
I use generative ai sometimes, and I find it useful for certain usecases.
Are you just following the in ternate hate bandwagon or do you really think it’s no good?
Generative AI has yet to actually solve a real business problem, let alone a problem that consumers actually have.
It’s creating content that floods internet spaces and workplace wikis faster than we can sort it.
AI-generated content is basically plastic: disposable, cheaper and worse quality than alternatives (human labor), and once it enters the ocean (the internet) will require humans to manually fish out and dispose of.
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The confounding part is that when I do get offered an “AI result”, it’s basically identical to the excerpt in the top “traditional search” result. It wasted a fair amount more time and energy to repeat what the top of the search said anyway. I’ve never seen the AI overview ever be more useful than the top snippet.
whats up with these shit ass titles? It’s not even REMOTELY hidden, it takes two fucking seconds of googling to figure this shit out.
The entire AI industry was dependent on GPU hardware manufacturers, and nvidia is STILL back ordered (to my knowledge)
This is like saying that crypto has a hidden energy cost.
As long as we are talking about crypto, and I know this is shocking, turns out some people are using it for unsavory acts. It is okay if you want to sit down.
my brother in christ people are making child pornography using generative AI. Everything sucks and is awful.
I don’t know what you want from me. I think it was pretty clear I was talking about crypto and badmouthing it. I won’t touch the child pornography generative AI issue with a ten foot pole and Covid mask.
nothing, i’m just making the point that it doesnt matter what you look at, there’s terrible shit happening everywhere.
Yes welcome to earth.
The results used to be better too. AI just produces junk faster.
If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.
I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
To be fair, it was never “hidden” since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.
Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.
Google already has their own TPUs, under the name Coral
I’m genuinely curious where their penny picking went? All of tech companies shove ads into our throats and steal our privacy justifying that by saying they operate at loss and need to increase income. But suddenly they can afford spending huge amounts on some shit that won’t give them any more income. How do they justify it then?
It’s another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investors are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)
Perception. If a company isn’t on the leading edge we don’t consider them the best.
Regardless if you use them or not, if Google didn’t touch AI but Edge did you would believe edge is more advanced.
Because data is king and sessions are going to be worth a lot more than searches. Go through the following
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Talk to a LLM about what product to buy
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Search online for a product to buy
Which one gives out more information about yourself?
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This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?
You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.
If these guys gave a shit they’d focus on light based chips, which are in very early stages, but will save a lot of power.
I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.
There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.
I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.
