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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of searches actually require any critical thinking at all? The Internet is not always a fountain of intellectual growth, sometimes it's just a tool.

I'll give you a concrete example where it does better than search: my last Google search was about how to zip a whole folder in the Linux terminal (I must have searched for that dozens of times in my life, but I don't do it very often so it doesn't stick).

I saw the results, and I noticed that they were mostly transcriptions, summaries or extensions of man pages listing all the options, which would take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling, otherwise I would have used man in the first place).

So I switched to the ChatGPT tab, asked, got the exact command I wanted, done.

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Thanks for the example!

While I would definitely, definitely think critically before running a command from the internet, I can see how that use case makes sense for ChatGPT if you’re willing to roll that way.

>…take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling…

Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

Once I saw the command, I knew that it made sense and it was the right one, because it's something I had in the back of my head, I just couldn't summon the specific syntax.

I wouldn't count that as critical thinking, although I guess it depends on how you define the term.

> Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

In order to make things friendlier towards search, nigh any answer you find will be drowned in a sea of junk. Eg, Googling sends me to: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-zip-a-file-in-linux

It does have an answer, around the middle of the page.

https://i.imgur.com/jVEyCZe.png (useful answer on the bottom)

Here's what I actually want:

https://i.imgur.com/tXOEIIX.png

What I actually want most of the time is the closest equivalent to "Hey Bob, what's the command to zip up a folder on Linux?"

This is my use for ChatGPT around 90% of the time. The other 10% is trying to get it do something more complicated, getting frustrated and giving up.

I get the correct command in the highlighted search result at the top, and in the first result: https://i.imgur.com/FdDAz64.png

Of course I only use relevant keywords in my search. Adding extra words like "how to" will add results containing those words, which tends to mean more SEO spam.

‘zip -r’ is first result for https://serpapi.com/playground?q=How+to+zip+folder+in+linux+...

Yes, I also got that first result that (from the snippet) seems to go straight to the command, but the funny thing is that the link doesn't work, at least from my end. And the next ones are all lists of commands that would take a nontrivial amount of time to skim, as I mentioned.

I don’t follow. Both ChatGPT and Google gave you the same command, but Google’s response contained links, therefore Google’s response is less good.

Wouldn’t you have had an identical experience copy and pasting from Google as you did ChatGPT? Did you recognize the correct command immediately in ChatGPT but have difficulty recognizing that same command on Google’s page?

The Google snippet doesn't have the full syntax, it mentions the "-r" option but doesn't reach an usage example. That's presumably in the link that didn't worn for me.

The crucial component is that you verified the result (by running the suggested command and observing it giving you the expected result).

This is different from asking it for an explanation or definition of something and not cross-checking every "fact".

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