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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I tried it a few times. Was useless. I asked stuff like "how to do X in Y" and it proceeded to give some generic answer about what X was and then something like "how to this in Y is specific to Y". Well duh.

I guess it can be interesting if you're after some Wikipedia-like information, but in those cases I just go to Wikipedia or similar.

Clearly I lack imagination, so, how to use this in a useful way?

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I have Bing enabled on the family computer by default on Windows for the Family Safety features. I tried searching for "rainbow friends official" yesterday to understand what it is (yes I'm that out of touch).

I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site.

I switched to Google and found the official site immediately and realised it's a Roblox game, so the Bing results weren't wrong at all but they sure looked wrong. There's just something about Bing that looks bad, I don't know what it is.

>I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site.

Same for me on most searches. Bing is far too cluttered and busy, all over the place, making your eyes constantly hunt to find what you're looking for.

Microsoft, if you're reading this, simpler is almost always better, no need to make the results page look like an Arch user's terminal session.

This is what Microsoft will always lack: taste and style. Every once in a while they accidentally (-or not) come up with something that is decent but it doesn’t last, next version is atrocious in some way or another.

- Im sure there’s talented professional behind anything that is good and the accident is their decisions surviving the corporate gauntlet of enshitification or expnanding the scope of the project such that it becomes an unpleasant mess, probably obnoxious too.

>This is what Microsoft will always lack: taste and style.

They alwawys lacked an authoritarian UX and design chief, like their own Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive who, for better or worse, would be the only one with the final verdict on what the corporate design of all products should look like and what is allowed to ship.

Microsoft is too fragmented, everyone of its products is basically a totally separate company with its own design language.

Instead of doing search yourself, you ask bing chat to tell you the answer.

It searches the web and writes you a cited essay based on the content of the search results. I read the essay it provides to determine which links to follow instead of scrolling a page of links. I’ve found it really useful.

Good for investigating generalities more than specifics, and there is a slight learning curve. It likes short direct questions.

e. Punctuation

> Good for investigating generalities more than specifics

I guess that's the main issue then for me. I'm seldom after generalities, and very often after specifics.

With the added value of having all seo, spam and ads removed, I find Bing chat better than Google search for generalities or recommendations. No more searching for a manual - just ask how to do something and it will find a way. It would be even better if you could configure the search engine. But for shopping it's obviously not very useful.

I think the absolute best pitch for LLMs is a natural language interface to things like PDFs. The vision of being able to "talk to" a book or paper rather than having to scroll and scroll is compelling. The same obviously also would apply to the Internet. For some reason, they just can't seem to pull that off. Asking ChatGPT to summarize an article is just a disaster.

Not to mention that most of the times it’s just slower than literally using bang(!) searches on a browser like duckduckgo.

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