[CuriouslyC]

Google search is so vulnerable. It's trash for a lot of queries these days, to the point that I'm tempted to switch to Bing. An iterative search tool using a ChatGPT interface on the sidebar that can summarize and cite as it goes would an instant switch.

[karaterobot]

I'm not sure that being bad is not the same as being vulnerable. Even people who despise Google (like yourself) apparently still use it. Google replaced Altavista et al. because it was miles better than they were. Nothing today is miles better than Google, and there is a lot less competition than there was in 1999. Google is synonymous with search, literally. I can't imagine a scenario in which anyone in my family stops using Google as a search engine; the idea wouldn't occur to them. I've been a Kagi user since the beta, and a DDG user before that, and still don't think Google's going anywhere soon.

[CuriouslyC]

My google volume has dropped heavily since chatgpt. I mostly use it to pull up urls for things when I already know what I'm looking for, or if I'm looking for very current information. ChatGPT can use bing which helps a lot with the current information aspect but I haven't found its search performance to be great, it's slow and it really wants to just answer questions briefly in accordance with its alignment. If it was faster and designed more around showcasing the best sites and content (like a search recommender hybrid) while also answering questions directly when possible it would be amazing.

[w4]

I agree that Google search is very vulnerable. The results are spammy and the current ad volume badly degrades usability for me. In my case, I don’t use Google search much anymore. Previously it was my one stop for finding information online.

Instead of Google search:

I’ve switched almost exclusively to Kagi for vanilla search. It feels like Google in 2015, and the forums/small web filters are great. I do rarely use !g, and usually I'm disappointed.

If I just need a quick question answered I’ll usually use Perplexity.

For coding questions, I mostly use copilot and documentation these days. I barely use search for coding questions, unless I run into a weird edge case, or need to find Github issues for a project. There’s too much link spam to wade through, and copilot is built right into VSCode, so I don’t have to context switch.

I was a big user and early adopter of ChatGPT, but I don’t use it much anymore. Special use models are better for specific use cases (e.g. copilot for coding), and if I want to learn general information about a topic or gather some opinions, I much prefer to search forums and blog posts or watch some YouTube videos (this is the one major bright spot for Alphabet imo). If I do need AI to do something for me, I prefer to use an API or local model. ChatGPT is inferior to the API/local products, especially if you know some Python. This is even more true when you take into consideration copilot (and starts to hint at the compounding opportunity of these tools).

If I want to do a deep dive on something I don’t even bother with most web content these days unless I'm researching a cutting edge topic. The general web is too noisy and inundated with inaccurate and low quality content. Most of the time I either buy a book or directly visit an authoritative source (e.g. the SEC, the courts, Wikipedia, etc.). Less frequently I'll find a niche forum or blog via Kagi's filters, or hit up Google Scholar/Arxiv (another bright spot for Alphabet, but very niche).

The most interesting thing to note here is that I’m paying for almost all of these things, rather than using free Google search, because the Google search user experience has degraded so badly. Kagi, copilot, LLM APIs, books, they all cost money. That doesn’t bode well for the Google search product long term.

[hackerlight]

> ChatGPT is inferior to the API/local products, especially if you know some Python.

Why is this? GPT-4 outperforms smaller models I can run locally. Is GPT-4 via API better than GPT-4 via webapp?

[w4]

Yes, for a couple of reasons:

- I control the system prompt to guide the model to do exactly what I want, rather than begging and cajoling ChatGPT. I will often use the API playground for this reason where someone else might use ChatGPT.

- For more complex problems, having the input and output in Python gives me a ton of options for data manipulation, storage, etc.

- Using an API call lets me daisy chain different models and other APIs/tools together. ChatGPT can sort of do this via plugins, but I haven't found it to be a great experience.

GPT-4 is definitely better than the local models by itself. It's not a clear winner when you start to get into fine-tuning/ensemble workflows. It's also less attractive in situations where I want to chew through a ton of tokens for a personal project and GPT-4 would get expensive.

[hackerlight]

> daisy chain different models and other APIs/tools together

> ensemble workflows

This is intriguing, can you explain in more detail what this looks like?

[CuriouslyC]

Look up langchain. You can have most models format output in such a way as to facilitate programmatic execution based on their contents, and you can let the model just run that way with some checks to keep it from losing the plot.

[rafaelgoncalves]

I feel the same. I keep using other search engines to get some useful response or content. I think the AI generated content or promoted links changed the results for the worse these days...

[dkasper]

I welcome the completion but surely Google could clone that. The real bet is that they won’t have the courage to do it.

[sulam]

Courage? What in the world does that even mean? How would it take any more “courage” than it took to launch a product that sucks people’s entire website into the search result, guaranteeing an outcry of epic proportion?

[chankstein38]

FWIW, I tried switching to Bing and it was equal or worse trash. I can't quantify it but I had my default search set to Bing for a few months and I routinely would search, find nothing relevant, then head to Google.

Google sucks but it still seems better than the other bigger players at least. Not a fanboy. I'd like to see something actually useful replace them all but that was my experience.