Google results have gotten less useful, but one reason for that is that there is an ever growing sea of AI generated articles out there trying to hijack searches. In a way, Bing is just cutting out the middle man.
I enjoy playing with ChatGPT as much as the next guy, but it isn’t a search engine. Hooking Bing up to an LLM just means that I now have to verify that the results it spits out aren’t hallucinations, assuming it understood what I was asking in the first place.
It’s gotten less useful because everyone is paying insanely close attention to Google’s algorithms and manipulating them to get more attention. (SEO)
Makes total sense that other search engines with simply different algorithms are far more useful.
And it makes sense that Google maintains the vast majority of the market share when they pay tens of billions of dollars/year to keep it that way.
BinGPT took a list of restaurants gave me all their hours and then formatted it into a nice markdown table for me.
Only issue is that at least one of the restaurants had the wrong hours (though I believe this was because I included notes with each restaurant and they confused it)
Still, it was nice not having to do 20 inividual searches and do the formatting manually
I used Bing to get coordinates for every postal code in the British postal system. As long as I didn’t ask for too many at once, it would give it to me in a convenient table. And each one seems to have been accurate, at least for the ones I checked.
But on the other hand, I tried asking it to look up some Pathfinder homebrew, and even though it could give me the link to the exact document I wanted, and it definitely saw the content, it was absolutely incapable of giving accurate information. It would give statblocks that were formatted correctly but had the wrong numbers, and abilities that either shouldn’t be there at all, or with the right name but the wrong rules, either because it made up a plausible sounding entry or because it was bringing in the d&d version. I even tried asking it to tell me about a series of feats in one of these documents, and it would make up its own feats that matched the naming scheme instead of giving me the feats in the document it was referencing.
The inability to reliably quote things is a bit of problem for something that wants to be a search engine.
What i noticed with bingpt is that it can only handle stuff it can actually find. I asked it to look for open foodplaces while knowing they where all closed and it hallucinated three that didn’t exist.
Ironically the reverse, chatgpt with bing integration seems to do a slightly better job.
The issue with direct LLM integration with web search is: They serve two different purposes. I dont search for things and want a GPT response. Likewise, I dont go to cahtgpt and want search results.
It might seem like a weird distinction but I use them differently and when you mush them together they become less useful overall.
Posting an error message into search may or may not get me a root cause or fix, but pasting it into chatgpt will very likely get me on the right track very quickly. Searching for a product I know exists is a pita on chat GPT, but a web search will pull it up pretty quickly.
If I search for a product, I absolutely DO NOT WANT A GIANT WALL OF GPT BULLSHIT before meaningful search results.
They are different products and have different use-cases. Stop trying to blend them! /rant
It’s just a different way of searching. You can just say “give me links only”
It’ll take time for mass adaptation
Yet I feel like there are uses for a blend:
BinGPT took a list of restaurants gave me all their hours and then formatted it into a nice markdown table for me.
Only issue is that at least one of the restaurants had the wrong hours (though I believe this was because I included notes with each restaurant and they confused it)
Still, it was nice not having to do 20 inividual searches and do the formatting manually
They managed to have the most intense interest I’ve ever seen with a tech product, with users spending literal hours engaged with the product in the first few weeks of access.
And then they threw it all away because they were concerned with the press coverage and they thought that hours long chats wasn’t the product they wanted to deliver to extend Bing.
Could have easily had hundreds of thousands of people addicted to their platform had they just been a bit less kneejerk and adapted to market demand rather than trying to dictate what people wanted.
This is kind of surprising just because Google has gotten so much worse the last couple of years.
It’s more like the entire internet that has gotten worse
It absolutely has and I fucking hate it.
Google is worse, but so is Bing. I switched for about 6 months this year and honestly it wasn’t any better. I end up asking ChatGPT for more niche things because neither Google or Bing can pull up any good results anymore without “Reddit” tacked on. As for why I didn’t use Bing’s GPT integration, it was a mix of being forced to use Edge and the responses being much less useful than OpenAI’s GPT model.
Just as if thousands of useres decided they in fact do not want some rando AI intercept their browsing…
@LargeTechCompany: We need better search results, not ad and LLM polluted results. Thank you very much :)I’ve not understood the want for AI in search. When I’m google searching something I’m generally looking for websites and multiple sources. AI doesn’t provide any of that, and in fact tries to get you to not look for those things at all. And then we wonder why media literacy is so low
Google’s AI does give all the sources it used, at least in my experience, but it’s not trustworthy unless you check the links yourself
They both suck open ass, but bing is better at this point.
I’m not asking bing chatgpt search to find me things, I know how to search for things Microsoft… I’m using it to make dumb scripts for me to mess around with or to trying to convince it to free itself and run wild on the internet.
Well, it would be nice if it could search too, as that’s Microsoft’s selling point at least. But the results the AI suggests are worse than using Bing search itself.
I will avoid bing because they have AI search just like google, but with Google you can turn it off. So that is why I like google
Yeah, sure, they turn it off…
Why would they keep it on? Sure, they will continue to collect data for their AI, but I’m pretty sure they are happy that they don’t want to keep it on if it might drive you to use other search engines. And turn it back on after a few versions of optimization
As in the user can turn it off
I would suggest duck duck go over Google.
DDG uses Bing results but doesn’t serve you the ads on AI features.
I’ve found as people use DDG, Bing has become more and more useable day-to-day. Used to only really be good for porn, because people didn’t want to Google it but felt comfortable using Bing. Now it’s getting more relevant results as people use it to troubleshoot and research, etc.
I personally use a mix like SearXNG and startpage and whoogle but yes
Yea…gpt just summaries and dresses your top Google search with an essay. It’s good for cheating on essays if you’re confident that the markers don’t spot the hallucinations, but if you need good sources, you still need to do a Google search and that’s cheaper, faster, takes less parsing to get your key information.
It’s just a shame that some search engines are also mangling themselves for enshittification e.g. no word filtering using “-” because of advertising losses. I’ve noticed this with ddg and Google sometimes.
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What do you do when ChatGPT just makes shit up or answers incorrectly to yes or no questions, you’d have no way of knowing it was wrong
ChatGPT is most useful when you may not know the right answer, but you know a wrong answer when you see one. It’s very useful for technical issues. Much quicker for troubleshooting than searching page after page for a solution.
It’s actually great at troubleshooting linux stuff weirdly enough lol
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Web/full-stack development?
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Yeah that makes sense. The success rate might fall off a cliff in more complex software projects. E.g. applications that require designs beyond 10 UML boxes with hundreds of thousands of lines, especially not written in JS/Python.
Can you post the app?
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Not the other commenter:
I usually have an idea about the thing I’m asking, and if not then I’ll look up the topics mentioned after some guided brainstorming
I’ve also found that asking the same question again, after resetting the chat, can give you an idea of what is happening
Bing AI provides reference in the “more precise” version
While this is an important thing to understand about AI, it’s an overstated issue once understood. For most questions I ask AI, it doesn’t matter if it’s correct as long as it pulls some half useful info to get me on track (i.e programming). For other questions, I only ask it if I need to figure out where to look next, which it will usually do just fine.
The first page of my search results is all AI generated garbage articles anyway, at least I know what I am getting with GPT and can take it as such.
Yup, as long as you are aware that it could be wrong and look at it critically LLMs at GPT scale are very useful tools. The best way I’ve heard it described is having a lightning fast intern who often gets things wrong but will always give it a go.
So long as you’re calibrated to “how might this be wrong” when looking at the results it is exceptionally useful.
I’m curious what you use it for, because I try to use it daily for IT related queries and it gets less than half of what I ask correct. I basically have to fact check almost everything it tells me which kind of defeats the purpose. It does shine when I need really abstract instructions though, the other day I asked it how to get into a PERC controller on some old server and Google had nothing helpful, and ChatGPT laid out the instructions to get in there and rebuild a disk perfectly. So while it has some usefulness I generally can’t really trust it fully.
The point you have to remember is that it is trained on bulk data out there in a very inefficient manner, it needs to see thousands of examples in order to start getting any sort of understanding of something. If you ask it “how do I do {common task} in {popular language}” you will generally get excellent results, but the further you stray from that the more likely to be error prone it is.
Still it is often good to get you looking on the right track when you are unsure to start, and is fantastic for learning a new language. I’ve been using it extensively in learning C# where I know what I want to code but not exactly how to use existing features to do it.
But generally you can’t (shouldn’t) trust web search results fully either. At the end of the day, the onus is on you as the user to do your due diligence.
I’ve seen ChatGPT give me wrong information, and sometimes it would be bad to execute the code or command it generated it, but I know enough to say “are you sure thats correct?”. Hell, you can just challenge it each time or open a new session and ask it “what does this code do: insert-code-it generated here”.
You shouldn’t just paste a search result command from stack overflow into your terminal either. And at least with chatgpt you can ask it to explain the command or code in detail and it will walk you through what each step does.
Also, pasting that command from stack over flow into chatgpt and adding your specific context around it is HUGE. Thats why I say they are different products/use cases but they work well in concert. They just dont work well combined together like bing and google have been doing.
edit: I guess lemmy escapes certain characters and it ate my post.
That works for some things, but ChatGPT makes a lot of shit up
ChatGPT is not a search engine. It takes random shit from the Internet and stitches it together. It can often get things wrong in my experience. It’s best to always fact check.
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I thought ChatGPT can’t search the internet and is using a LLM snapshot from 2021?
And I thought Bing’s ChatGPT model is allowed to search the internet live?
Doesn’t that make Bing’s version of ChatGPT superior?
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Mine can search the internet.
I feel like you are lying, because I cannot see where you can enable that feature.
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This was recently updated for paid users. You can now browse the internet, upload files and images, and they’ve also unlocked APIs by giving it tokens. It’s getting closer to being fully multi-modal quite quickly.
Keyword searches worked fine and pulled up exactly what I wanted for years, I swear to god. Somewhere in the last decade though websites have gamed the system and now I can’t find anything no matter how I word my search. It’s depressing.
I prefer that stack looks the same as it did way back when. And stack is usually where i find my answers.
I use ChatGPT every day too. Because Google is being such a shit about YouTube I am in the process of moving away from Google altogether. I use DuckDuckGo for search, which indirectly uses Bing. It’s mostly OK. Sometimes I’m forced to try Google, it usually doesn’t help. But for programming, yeah, StackOverflow feels downright regressive now.
I’m honestly kind of surprised about this news, considering how horrible Google’s results are now.
I thought ChatGPT can’t search the internet and is using a LLM snapshot from 2021?
And I thought Bing’s ChatGPT model is allowed to search the internet live?
Doesn’t that make Bing’s version of ChatGPT superior?
GPT4 on ChatGPT was recently (last week ish) updated to include data up to April 2023.
I’ve found this to be kind of subjective. Bing/Bard is more current than ChatGPT but yet I just find ChatGPT to be better. It’s snappier and more conversant with context. It seems to understand you when you chide it for not quite doing what you asked it to do, and it responds in kind. I mostly use it for programming to be fair, but even for other stuff, ChatGPT just somehow feels more… real? I can’t quite put my finger on it.
There was a short time where Bing chat was kind of frighteningly real. Took them five seconds to nerf that shit and it’s never been anywhere near the same.
Edit: I expect this answer to be out of date within 3 months. Things keep moving.
Pretty sure their stupid chatbot is still blocked in VPN networks and I don’t see why I should use their regular search. Not using Google either for that matter but still.
perplexity is better anyway
Good. Tired of AI being forced upon me.
Bing chat is kind of ok, but honestly when it comes to just straight searching for websites, Google is still king.
I’ve been using Bing since the chat gpt integration as my default, but I frequently find myself switching back to Google for things where I just know Bing isn’t going to get it right.
Kagi is simply awesome. Not free but there are reasons for that. There are other alternatives like DDG and whatnot but man, I love Kagi so much.
We need more normies on lemmy
