Technology

59534 readers

3168 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

132

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT (danluu.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Zen@biglemmowski.win to c/technology@lemmy.world

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I find it pretty interesting that kagi is rated as Terrible search engine, even ChatGPT preforms better.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] podperson@lemm.ee 19 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Are people actually using ChatGPT as a search engine?

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they're surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask "hey, what's that 80s horror comedy that's kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?" I go to a chatbot.

EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:

The movie you are referring to is "Ghoulies." It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I find this fascinating because that seems like the most difficult of the 3 to do for a normal search engine and sounds like an incredibly useful tool, but everybody and their mother seems to only care about whether it can do the other 2 or if you can trick it into spilling military secrets.

[–] MudMan@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

Well, yeah. So much of this conversation has gotten really dumb, with both advocates and detractors misrepresenting the tech and its capabilities and applying it to the wrong uses and applications as a result.

Honestly, early on I did think as a summary service for search queries it'd be more useful than it ended up being. It quickly became obvious that without the search results onscreen you basically have to fact check every piece of info you get, so it's only really useful to find answers you already know but had forgotten or that you need a source for.

But hey, at least I noticed that it kinda isn't before I built it as a key part of Windows. At this point if I was going to build a search app around this tech I'd use it for a short summary to replace Google's little blurb cards and still give you the raw results immediately below. It's only really good at parsing a wonky search prompt into a more accurate query. That's why when I have to use one of these I go to Perplexity instead of raw ChatGPT or Bing or whatever, it's the one that's built the most like that, although you still end up having to argue with it when it insists on being wrong and gets sidetracked by its own mistakes.

[–] nucleative@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I use it as an answer engine. Queries like: what's that css property for xyz, or please summarize this email, or give me the top 25 most commonly used color words in English in a json schema like this.

All of that could be found with a normal search engine but I'd have to work harder and sort through a lot of trash along the way.

ChatGPT just understands what I'm looking for almost no matter how poorly worded my query is and just answers the question.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 8 points 9 months ago

please summarize this email

As long as you realize they store and use that email.

[–] SGG@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

It's a whatever question you ask engine. You can ask for the information directly and/or ask for sources to back it up.

[–] bleistift2@feddit.de 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM&pp=ygUTbGVnYWwgZWFnbGUgY2hhdGdwdA%3D%3D

Yes, they do. Lawyers in the US did, citing invented cases in court.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 2 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM&pp=ygUTbGVnYWwgZWFnbGUgY2hhdGdwdA%3D%3D

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

More and more yes. You often get an answer without having to link out to some bullshit site with ads everywhere. It's often pretty clean and precise.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

Wrong, but precise.

[–] podperson@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago

Interesting responses here - perhaps I’ll add it to my daily rotation as a science experiment.