I was watching the RFK Jr questioning today and when Bernie was talking about healthcare and wages I felt he was the only one who gave a real damn. I also thought “Wow he’s kinda old” so I asked my phone how old he actually was. Gemini however, wouldnt answer a simple, factual question about him. What the hell? (The answer is 83 years old btw, good luck america)
I mostly can’t understand why people are so into “LLMs as a substitute for Web search”, though there are a bunch of generative AI applications that I do think are great. I eventually realized that for people who want to use their cell phone via voice, LLM queries can be done without hands or eyes getting involved. Web searches cannot.
Would saying “Gemini, open the Wikipedia page for Bernie Sanders and read me the age it says he is”, for example, suffice as a voice input that both bypasses subject limitations and evades AI bullshitting?
Because web search was intentionally hobbled by Google so people are pushed to make more searches and see more ads.
I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:
Do any of them actually work? As in, you search something and it gives you relevant results to the whole thing you typed in?
I’ve used DuckDuckGo for a long time, so I would say yes. But the best way to figure that out is just to try it for a while. There is literally nothing to lose.
I have been using it for about 7 years and its just as shit.
It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.
Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.
The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).
Web search by voice was a solved problem in my recent memory. Then it got shitty again