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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Here is a practical example of a problem I couldn’t solve with Google, but could in 5 seconds with GPT.

We use deities to name our sprints at work. When you search Google for “Deity starting with <letter>”, you get a list of greek and roman gods. I got tired of that.

So I asked GPT “what is a god that starts with <letter> and isn’t roman or greek”. It immediately spat out a Norse god. Next time it was Hindu. The increased variety was refreshing as hell. Google was not able to process a negative query.

Plus the added paragraph of description about that deity was lovely.

The point is: Sometimes (often) I don’t want search, I just want a good enough answer.

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I think the main point about all this is that Google search results are now a complete joke for the most part. After you scroll down through the list of paid ads, the top results are typically a bunch of SEO gamed waffle, stuffed with long tail keywords and designed to provide enough bland text to rise up the rankings.

The actual information value of these 'results' is usually close to zero. I went onto a top search result yesterday, and the scammers hadn't even bothered to do a decent page. It was just a list of links to 404 pages, with an intro paragraph to satisfy the Google algorithm. It was pathetic and a waste of time.

That's why they're running scared. They know their key product is broken and useless, which means they're ripe for being ignored.

Yep. Even wikipedia now often shows up towards the bottom of first page despite being more informative.

But I get it, most people dont want wikipedia because they really do seek the 10 second waffle answer.

I had to work with a list of the 50 states abbreviations, full names, etc. Previously, I'd have found the data somewhere with Google et al and then manipulated it myself into the JSON I needed. But this time I asked GPT to not only source the data, but also return it structured to my liking—with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico")

Lots of my searches are simply I want an answer, but often times I also want to then do something with the result. This is where ChatGPT is going to eat Google's lunch, IMO.

this seems like the kind of thing that gpt would potentially hallucinate something like "East Virginia" or "Ardakota" complete with abbreviation, and maybe that's fine with 50 states but you're playing with fire if it's something you can't immediately catch the mistake

also, how hard is it to get a list of abbreviations, and wrap them all in quote and comma and brackets. with vim that's barely more work than a copy-paste

> but you're playing with fire if it's something you can't immediately catch the mistake

Agreed. I was able to manually review 52 results, but wouldn't trust it blindly.

> also, how hard is it to get a list of abbreviations, and wrap them all in quote and comma and brackets.

Not hard at all. And I may still do that, but it was pretty enjoyable to ask the machine.

with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico")

Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT?

FWIW, Miss Manners had a column a couple of weeks ago where she stated that we should not say please or thank you to machines, including Siri and Alexa.

I was surprised.

> Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT?

Yup. So when the machines take over, hopefully they'll enslave me last, or put me in a more pleasant Matrix instance compared to the average.

You'll suffer just as much ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

I did. I even asked ChatGPT if having "please" and "thank you" included in my prompts affects it in any way shape or form—it told me "No".

I still do it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What we don't know is whether that "No" is actually a "No".

If you don’t mind the occasional hallucinated response, this is a great use case for LMMs.

> Google was not able to process a negative query.

That's been a serious problem for some time. Preceding a query term with "-" doesn't seem to do anything any more.

Ah the good ol' deity sprint names use case every team has!

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