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Comment by nbittich

7 months ago

Everytime I need to make a search on Google, I start to feel anxious, already convinced I'm not going to find anything useful about the problem I'm trying to solve. This often means I already tried everything else. It's a sad situation.a product shouldn't make you feel anxious.

37 comments

nbittich

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imzadi  7 months ago

I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.

  • ianbutler  7 months ago

    I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.

    • hedora  7 months ago

      Append a "?" to the end of the kagi query. It runs what appears to be a ChatGPT RAG query backed by a search engine index, and puts the results at the top of the normal search engine result page. It greatly outperforms any other LLM I've played with, and, as a bonus, each paragraph in the response contains working hyperlinks to primary sources.

      If you don't want to pay Kagi or login, you can play with it here:

      https://kagi.com/fastgpt

      (no need to append "?" when you run queries through that form).

      2 replies →

    • foobarian  7 months ago

      Search engines worked a lot better when the internet had a higher SNR in the link graph. Nowadays it's an ocean of SEO sewage and no search engine can do a good job. It's not that Google ruined search by showing ads; it has genuinely become a harder problem. There is not much that can be done except set up a federated darknet where any commercial activity is banned; otherwise, the incentives are all wrong.

      2 replies →

    • imzadi  7 months ago

      Kagi lets me raise and lower sites or even block sites, so I get results more relevant to me. If I see a site that is not useful (hello Quora) I can block them. If I see something I like, I can raise it.

    • doctor_eval  7 months ago

      These days I go chatgpt4 -> ddg -> Google. I did the Kagi trial but it wasn’t compelling.

      I am generally sceptical of GPT results, but also of other results, and GPT search is easier to fine tune and drill down into. For example if it gives me an obviously wrong answer, you can call BS. And it even apologises! Much more difficult to do for search engines.

its_ethan  7 months ago

For what it's worth, I have the opposite issue - when I can't find what I'm looking for on more privacy focused search engines, I go to google because 99 times out of 100 it gives me what I'm looking for in the easiest/quickest way.

y04nn  7 months ago

This is my experience too, I'm baffled that when making a basic search about a programming language on Google, the top results are only SEO garbage that waste your time for a basic answer. I'm better off asking GPT those days.

wslh  7 months ago

I tried to lie to myself because Google occupies a lot of good emotions and I have great memories, but it is incredible how many searches were replaced by a simple prompt to ChatGPT, except when I add a site:reddit.com to my Google search.

For example, if I want to benchmark products I go directly to some subreddits and make my own benchmark spreadsheet.

gambiting  7 months ago

I've literally made the jump last week and switched all my defaults over to bing, after Google couldn't find the simplest query I had about a video game that Bing found in first result. I'm just so done with google.

barfbagginus  7 months ago

Start learning how to accurately prompt ai's, and have valid and constructive conversations with them. This replaces 80% of the need for search, and gives you a number of valuable things search could never provide including valuable and constructive critiques and analysis. If you think that you can't do this with llms because they are just parrots that means you have not read the latest papers on prompting and meet update your beliefs on the capabilities of llms like gpt4. These things do effective critical reasoning, with increasingly low rates of hallucination.

To reduce the anxiety of search, use AI enhanced search to filter through the dross and find both meaningful search terms and results.

After I did this my search anxiety reduced back to the level it was around 2012-2014, when Google had an effective search product. The quality of life improvement on search alone has been profound. But when you add in the fact that gpt4 can also help with communications issues, conflict resolution, and understanding my own complex and sometimes baffling emotions, the quality of life increase has been far greater than anything Google search ever gave me.

Please consider upskilling with llm assisted search and analysis skills.

resource_waste  7 months ago

I'm like this with Microsoft products. Anytime I need to buy one, I'm so worried I'm going to buy the wrong one. Once I have it, I'm worried its attached to the wrong account. Once I run it, I'm worried it wont start and I'll need to install it through some weird microsoft store. Then when its working, I'm worried my OS is going to slow down because of telemetry reporting. And I really hope microsoft team screen share works during an important meeting.

Google is disappointing. Microsoft actually makes me scared. Fortunately Apple hasnt really made its way into corporate life, so I've been spared their punishments.

  • barfbagginus  7 months ago

    I would like to report that this emotion and experience completely disappeared after I ported my business workstation over to Ubuntu budgie. Not only does my computer crash a whopping 80% less, but it also uses 30% less memory on average.

    The main challenge was that I have to run my CAD software in a Windows VM. Ironically though the solution is more stable than running the CAD software on bare metal!

    I can definitively say that being free of Microsoft anxiety is very sweet, and worth far more than any effort I had to spend to do the porting. It has radically improved my computing quality of life.

emmelaich  7 months ago

I feel there's a place for a search engine that doesn't give an f about currency / recent results.

Although sometimes useful, I find my my search results contaminated by popular, recent content.

And it must cost Google a lot to continuously scrape the web.