Search engines haven't worked reliably for several years now, the top results for almost any search are from social media pages that you can't even read without an account. The Internet is broken.
Comment on ChatGPT is down worldwide, conversations disappeared for users
jaybone@lemmy.zip 5 hours agoRegular search engines did that 20 years ago, without blowing out the power grid.
Chozo@fedia.io 1 hour ago
Black616Angel@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
No they didn’t and they still don’t really do that.
There are too many things (nowadays?) where you have to literally write a question on reddit, stack overflow or Lemmy or the likes and explain your situation in minute detail, because what you find online through search engines is only the standard case which just so happens to not work for you for some odd reason.
Believe me, when I say that, because I always try search engines first, second and third, before even thinking of using some bs-spitting AI, but it really helped me with two very special problems in the last month.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 41 minutes ago
what you find online through search engines is only the standard case which just so happens to not work for you for some odd reason
Usually because the highest-rated solution is half-assed bullshit proposed by an overconfident newbie (or an LLM regurgitating it). I mainly use Stack Overflow as a way to become pissed off enough that I’ll go solve the problem myself, like I should have done in the first place. Indignation As A Service.
Black616Angel@discuss.tchncs.de 38 minutes ago
This is also in part true.
Today I was searching for multiple things regarding jinja2 and was always recommended a site that no longer exists, as top result, mind you.
cenzorrll@piefed.ca 3 hours ago
Ah, but you see, they don’t do it now.
Zexks@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Yeah then people.learned how to game it and its shit now. Pointing how something worked 20 years ago does shit all for how it works now
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
And LLM’s aren’t gamed? Like Grok constantly being tweaked to not say anything inconvenient about Musk? Or ChatGPT citing absurd Reddit posts deliberately made by users to make AI responses wrong?
AI is built from the ground up to do what they want, and they’re no better than those crappy info-scraper sites like wearethewindoezproz dot com that scrape basic info off every other site and offer it as a solution to your problem with [SOLVED] in the result title. “Did you turn it off and on again?”
Grimy@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
And now we have something better. I’m all for a better grid running on renewables though, which is the actual problem.
SlimePirate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 minutes ago
This is a bad faith argument. Search engines are notoriously bad to find rare specialized information and usually return empty search results for too specific requests. Moreover you need the exact keywords while LLMs use embeddings to find similar meanings