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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

> I genuinely don't understand the appeal of AI for search

If you're good at googling the flow is: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > Figure out how to dismiss the cookies gate without accepting the cookies > Dismiss the google login box > Dismiss the popover pushing you to install an app > Scroll the page or ctrl+F to find the answer

With ChatGPT it's just type your question and your answer is appearing right away.

Of course I understand ChatGPT shouldn't be used for this because it will lie to you and make things up. But I am saying that's why you'll see people who don't know that preferring it over Google.

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Aaand this is basically the story of silicon valley over and over again.

Build a product that's more convenient, and people will use it. Google is so full of shit now, and even answer boxes are below 4 ads, it's just way more comfortable and efficient to ask chatgpt.

This morning I wanted to know how many calories there are in a breaded chicken breast. Chatgpt told me in 3 seconds after asking. Google would have been way more time. (sidenote: I also hate google, so I'd much rather use chatgpt anyway)

Also Google (and distressingly, DDG as of late) sanitizes the hell out of the SERPs to only present you with “approved viewpoints”.

And I’m not talking about fringe Q Anon type stuff: the other day I was looking up the specifics of China’s “Blue Sky Initiative” climate change policies and the only thing Goog/DDG would show me (despite several attempts at rephrasing the query) was Western industry think tanks bellyaching about how the policies effect profits. It took me a good ten minutes of refining my search before I got an English translation of the actual policy bullet points.

I can’t imagine this being such a PITA on 2013 era Google.

out of curiosity, how did you verify the information?

I didn’t, but it sounded right. I know it might be incorrect.

However, I’ve seen plenty of bad information in google answer boxes too. And finding it in actual search results is going to be way more time. It’s not a life and death question.

It lies like crazy on surprising things. Database parameters for an enterprise provider, for example, I've seen hallucination in 5% of cases. That's _bad_ when its taken as authoritative.

I like that you can get results quickly and it solves the "I don't know what I'm looking for" problem.

I'm learning typescript and ran into a weird typescript construct the other day, I threw it into chatgpt and asked "what is this" and it explained it to me. I'm not entirely sure if pasting in a bunch of braces and parentheses into google would find me the same result.

Don't get me wrong, thats a great use case!

None of the results are surprising if you simply read what OpenAI writes about their own machine. It's an autocomplete engine.

An autocomplete engine with "sparks of AGI", because gotta get that sweet sweet VC money and market it as the Next Big Thing.

My googling flow: Ask the question > Clock which result isnt spam and click it > uBLock Origin blocks everything > ctrl+F to find the answer

Well, if you make up the answer from nowhere yourself, you save the work of creating a question and typing it on the ChatGPT prompt.

I mean the internet lies and makes stuff up too, being first on Google results has nothing to do with truthfulness.

That's the glory of a search engine. You have multiple sources available to review, compare and - with enough experience - learn which sources you can more readily trust than others.

AI offers none of the above. Ask the same question twice in a row, maybe you'll get a different answer, maybe you won't. You won't know which of the two answers are hallucinations, which are true factoids it trained on, and which are bogus things it had been trained on. There's literally no providence for the results- no trail, no references, nothing, because it's really a sophisticated game of "Whose Line" where everything's made up and nothing matters.

painful how accurate that is

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