this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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1256
Google search is over (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Via @[email protected]

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

  • DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

  • Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K." "What about Kenya?" "Kenya suck deez nuts?"

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Thanks to this post, I changed my search engine in Vivaldi to DuckDuckGo, and Edge uses Bing already, and I changed Mull's engine to Ecosia. Phew! Now I feel better.

Google when did you get so crummy?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you are going to use Bing, may I suggest you use Ecosia (ecosia.org). They plant trees the more searches you make and use Bing on the backend.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

What's their privacy policy like?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

https://www.qwant.com 🤷

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All public searx instances:

https://searx.space/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Doesn't Bing use ChatGPT, though?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

ChatGPT isn't the problem here. Some website has something up saying that's what ChatGPT responds, but I tried it and it did not. Instead, it corrected me.

Google, on the other hand, is still saying the same thing quoting the same site.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And duck is based on bing

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The topic isn't even true.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Yep it's a post about somebody typing a dumb query into a search engine and getting dumb results. Search engines have always worked better when you use more specific and unique language that's relevant to what you're looking for, versus vague questions entered like some grandma asking a question on Facebook.