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FWIW Brave search lets you disable AI summaries
Then how will I know how many ‘r’ is in Strawberry /s
This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.
Information is not truth. A do or die slogan for the 21st century.
Start using SearXNG.
I legiterally have an LLM use searxng for me.
Can you briefly explain how this works? Do you have a link or something similar?
There are many projects just search for clones of perplexity most use searxng + llms. I used one recently called yokingma / Search_with_ai But there are others
Thanks for the new rabbit hole! 😁
But you don’t use a spell check?
No, I don’t, but the misspelling was intentional.
brother eww
searX still uses the same search engines.
Yes, however, using a public SearXNG instance makes your searches effectively private, since it’s the server doing them, not you. It also does not use generative AI to produce the results, and won’t until or unless the ability for normal searches is removed.
And at that point, you can just disable that engine for searching.
from a privacy perspective…
you might as well use a vpn or tor. same thing.Yes, but that’s not the only benefit to it. It’s a metasearch engine, meaning it searches all the individual sites you ask for, and combines the results into one page. This makes it more akin to DDG, but it doesn’t just use one search provider.
it’s a fantastic metasearch engine. but also people frequently dont configure it to its max potential IMO . one common mishap is the frequent default setting of sending queries to google. 💩
Biggest reason I stopped using Google
It works great for me
cool logical fallacy you allow to rule your life
OK lol
The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
Now generative AI has come along to dilute knowledge in a great sea of excrement. Humans have to hunt through the shit to find knowledge.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s by design.
Considering who’s pushing it the hardest, it probably is.
The Internet was a great resource for sharing and pooling human knowledge.
Bruh did you ever went to 4chan or Reddit? The Internet turned to a dumpster fire long time before AI.
Everyone knew that you don’t go to 4chan for information or knowledge
It’s still part of the Internet, if you can just pick and choose what Parts we are talking about, then the Internet ist still fine 🥸
To be fair, humans were already diluting it in a great sea of excrement, the robots just came to take our job and do it even faster and better.
I mean google was already like this before GenAI.
Its a nightmare to find anything you’re actually looking for and not SEO spam.
Gen AI cuts out some of that noise but it has its own problems too.
You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You’d have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.
And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.
Oh yeah I remember the AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Dogpile days. I agree searxh has come a long way. I’m just saying Google used to be better in that old sweet spot.
Eh…I got it to find a product that met the specs I was looking for on Amazon when no other search worked. It’s certainly a last resort but it worked. Idk why whenever I’m looking to buy anything lately somehow the only criteria I care about are never documented properly…
Out of curiosity, did it find a source for those specs that wasn’t indexed well elsewhere?
Yea. It was reading the contents of the item description I think. In this instance I was looking for an item with specific dimensions and just searching those didn’t work because Amazon sellers are ass at naming shit and it returned a load of crap. but when I put them in their AI thing it pulled several matches right away.
It’s useful to point you in the right direction, but anything beyond that necessitates more research
I mean, it gave me exactly what I asked for. The only further research was to actually read the item description to verify that but I could have blindly accepted it and received what I was looking for.
In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.
LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.
Ok but may I point you to the reality that internet spread misinformation is a critically bad problem at the moment
I’ve used it for very, very specific cases. I’m on Kagi, so it’s a built in feature (that isn’t intrusive), and it typically generates great answers. That is, unless I’m getting into something obscure. I’ve used it less than five times, all in all.
Who else is going to aggregate those recipes for me without having to scroll past ads a personal blog bs?
Not LLM, that’s for sure
Tell me you’re not using them without telling me you’re not using them.
Thd fuck do you mean without telling? I am very explicitly telling you that I don’t use them, and I’m very openly telling you that you also shouldn’t
I use them hundreds of times daily. I’m 3-5x more productive thanks to them. I’m incorporating them into the products I’m building to help make others who use the platform more productive.
Why the heck should I not use them? They are an excellent tool for so many tasks, and if you don’t stay on top of their use, in many fields you will fall irrecoverably behind.
There was a project a few years back that scrapped and parsed, literally the entire internet, for recipes, and put them in an elasticsearch db. I made a bomb ass rub for a tri-tip and chimichurri with it that people still talk about today. IIRC I just searched all tri-tip rubs and did a tag cloud of most common ingredients and looked at ratios, so in a way it was the most generic or average rub.
If I find the dataset I’ll update, I haven’t been able to find it yet but I’m sure I still have it somewhere.
So I rarely splurge on an app but I did splurge on AntList on Android because they have a import recipe function. Also allows you to get paywall blocked recipes if you are fast enough.
spl
People buy apps?
No. Learn to become media literate. Just like looking at the preview of the first google result is not enough blindly trusting LLMs is a bad idea. And given how shitty google has become lately ChatGPT might be the lesser of two evils.
No.
Yes.Using chatgpt as a search engine showcases a distinct lack of media literacy. It’s not an information resource. It’s a text generator. That’s it. If it lacks information, it will just make it up. That’s not something anyone should use as any kind of tool for learning or researching.
Well, inside that text generator lies useful information, as well as misinformation of course, because it has been trained on exactly that. Does it make shit up? Absolutely. But so do and did a lot of google or bing search results, even prior to the AI-slop-content farm era.
And besides that, it is a fancy text generator that can use tools, such as searching bing (in case of ChatGPT) and summarizing search results. While not 100% accurate the summaries are usually fairly good.
In my experience the combination of information in the LLM, web search and asking follow up questions and looking at the sources gives better and much faster results than sifting though search results manually.
As long as you don’t take the first reply as gospel truth (as you should not do with the first google or bing result either) and you apply the appropriate amount of scrutiny based on the importance of your questions (as you should always do), ChatGPT is far superior to a classic web search. Which is, of course, where media literacy matters.
Both the paid version of OpenAi and co-pilot are able to search the web if they don’t know about something.
The biggest problem with the current models is that they aren’t very good at knowing when they don’t know something.
The o1 preview actually solves this pretty well, But your average search takes north of 10 seconds.
They never know about something though. They are just text randomisers trained to generate plausible looking text
What does that have to do with what I wrote?
The problem isn’t that the model doesn’t know when it doesn’t know. The models never know. They’re text predictors. Sometimes the predictive text happens to be right, but the text predictor doesn’t know.
So, let me get this straight. It’s your purpose in life, to find anytime anyone mentions the word know in any form of context to butt into the conversation with no helpful information or context to the message at hand and point out that AI isn’t alive (which is obvious to everyone) and say it’s just a text predictor (which is misleading at best)? Can someone help me crowdsource this poor soul a hobby?
You’re strangely angry
You ate wrong. It is incredibly useful if the thing you are trying to Google has multiple meanings, e.g. how to kill a child. LLMs can help you figure out more specific search terms and where to look.
LLMs can help you figure out more specific search terms and where to look.
Not knowing how to use a search engine properly doesn’t mean these sites are better. It just means you have more to learn.
If sites (especially news outlets and scientific sites) were more open, maybe people would have means of researching information. But there’s a simultaneous phenomenon happening as the Web is flooded with AI outputs: paywalls. Yeah, I know that “the authors need to get money” (hey, look, a bird flew across the skies carrying some dollar bills, all birds are skilled on something useful to the bird society, it’s obviously the way they eat and survive! After all, we all know that “capitalism” and “market” emerged on the first moments of Big Bang, together with the four fundamental forces of physics). Curiously, AI engines are, in practice, “free to use” (of course there are daily limitations, but these aren’t a barrier just like a paywall is), what’s so different here? The costs exist for both of them, maybe AI platforms have even higher costs than news and scientific publication websites, for obvious reasons. So, while the paywalls try to bring dimes to journalism and science (as if everyone had spare dimes for hundreds or thousands of different mugs from sites where information would be scattered, especially with rising costs of house rents, groceries and everything else), the web and its users will still face fake news and disinformation, no matter how hard rules and laws beat them. AI slops aren’t a cause, they’re a consequence.
Nice incoherent rant bro
You know that people used to pay for newspapers right? Local tv news was free on maybe one or two channels, but anything else was on cable tv (paid for) or newspapers.
We WANT news to cost money. If you expect it to be free to consume, despite all the costs associated with getting and delivering journalism (let’s see, big costs just off the top of my head: competitive salaries, travel to news worthy sites, bandwidth to serve you content, all office space costs, etc), then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads in tiny, bite sized articles that actually have no substance, because the only revenue they get is ad views and clicks.
That is NOT what we want. Paywalls aren’t bad unless we’re talking scientific research. Please get out of the mindset of everything should be free, don’t sneer at “authors need money” mf they DO if you want anything that’s worth a damn.
No one should take The Verge seriously after their PC-building fiasco
I don’t think I will.
