Comment by b3kart

3 days ago

Don’t you think that’s because Google was objectively a head above everyone other search engine for a long time?

15 comments

b3kart

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azan_  3 days ago

It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

  • DrScientist  3 days ago

    As Chrome has about 75% market share across all platforms - probably 90% of those use the google default.

    As far as I'm aware OpenAI doesn't control any defaults for which AIChat service to use.

  • Spivak  3 days ago

    Yeah but the only alternative that's actually better is paid. Google is still best ad supported search engine out there. There's no one obvious to turn to or recommend.

    The best free alternative to Google right is ironically $preferred_llm_provider and ChatGPT is the obvious uncapped free option. I think free will end up being OpenAI's most if they manage to make it profitable.

  • twelve40  3 days ago

    > It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

    if people are still using it, then it's really one of the few things, right?

    * you are wrong and it's not awful

    * it _is_ awful but good enough for normal people to never care about alternatives, which are anyway not even very easy to find given the absolute stranglehold google has on that slice

    either way not quite the same as choice of llms today.

  • matthewkayin  3 days ago

    I've been feeling the pain of google being awful for a while now. Do you have a different search engine you would recommend?

    • flaburgan  2 days ago

      I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search

    • rkomorn  3 days ago

      I used Kagi for several months, I guess I'd at least recommend trying it out.

      I stopped using it, though, and I can't honestly say I've missed it. It was nice not having sponsored results, I guess, but overall it didn't feel like a transformative experience.

hn_throwaway_99  3 days ago

Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.