It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
ChatGPT for general knowledge and programming questions. Mostly straight to the point answers without 500 word drivel and 6 ad blocks on a single page for a 3 line answer you find on most blogs…
Literally the worst source for anything…
It has no understanding, it just craps out things that look right, absolutely awful for code generation beyond boilerplate. (And I do pay for the better model. )
Its more like its only as smart as the average person… Which isnt that high of a bar so yeah for anything even mildly specific its dogshit
I mean, it doesn’t even produce compilable code half the time. Even if you give it feedback about which error it produces, it might not fix it after 3-4 corrections. I’ve ended up in loops where it cycles through incorrect suggestions, apparently forgetting that all previous answers are incorrect.
Eh, I found it quite useful in giving me relatively well known information. As for code, it’s great at telling me what functions and such do without having to traverse the documentation for a library and such, and also explaining stuff I am confused about. It is faster and more convenient for a lot of stuff, as long as you double check important info (but you have to do that anyway, never use a single source etc etc).
Use your critical thinking while reading to differentiate between scientifically sound claims and nonscientific marketing paroles.
It only works at the low level and for the really brainless stuff.
There are a lot of things which beyond a certain level require domain specific expertise to spot the bullshit.
One of the first things the genuine skeptic figures out is the limits of one’s own capability to evaluate information.
You can use some heuristics to try and spot greedy/marketing bollocks even in domains you don’t understand in depth (for example: cui bono - if those pushing a message benefit from others believing it, it instantly goes into the “untrusted” mental bucket) but even that only goes so far (it’s not by chance that, for example, in politics and economics most Think Tanks hide their sources of funding: it hides the direct link between “studies” they publish those who fund them benefiting if the public and politicians believe those “studies”).
In summary, do it whilst being aware that we’re all limited and as smart as one is there are plenty of equally smart people who make money from swindling others.
I’ve switched over to a paid search engine, kagi.com. There are no ads and the results are better than DDG.
Paying for a search engine is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard lol. DDG is just better and I question what you use to guage better results, especially since you already spent money and are already susceptible to bias.
If you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Don’t knock it til you try it.
Ridiculous pricing (unless you pick the Ultimate plan for 25 bucks a month you pay per individual searches), the “Why do we need an account” link leads to 404 and “example searches” that totally aren’t curated.
Yeah, I’m gonna pass. DDG is great anyway. The only times it doesn’t really find what I want, Google doesn’t find shit either.
If you’re not paying for it, you are not the customer, but the product. You most likely fit into the $5 or $10 plan. Here’s the page you’re looking for: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html
If you’re not paying for it, you are not the customer, but the product.
While that’s generally a good way of thinking to stay alert, it’s not a dogma. It discredits the whole, vast FOSS ecosystem, most prominently the Linux kernel, or services like Wikipedia that don’t sell your data and rely solely on community contributions and donations.
DDG finances itself via non-personalized ads that aren’t very annoying. They won’t become a trillion dollar company that way but can get by.
Interesting, was the timing and community chosen for this query better than mine a couple days ago? Regardless, this post provides me more responses to a similar question to sort through, so no complaints here!
Phrasing and content are quite different, even if the points end up being the almost the same.
This post “feels” a great deal more relatable, I don’t think AI applies, or at least, I’m not familiar with the issue you are outlining.
This post “feels” a great deal more relatable, I don’t think AI applies, or at least, I’m not familiar with the issue you are outlining.
As can be seen in some other replies here, and in some other threads, some have taken to using AI in the sense of ChatGPT to aid in finding/researching/summarizing info, hence my mention of it in my thread.
Appreciate the feedback btw, I was in a drier headspace with my questioning a couple days ago, so it does read more detached.
The problem with that is that you need to know enough about the subject to know when it’s just making shit up to sound clever. If you don’t, and you just believe everything it says, you’re going to be teaching yourself bollocks.
I started paying for a search engine called Kagi. Google and the other free search engines are completely fucking worthless these days.
