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How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT (danluu.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I find it pretty interesting that kagi is rated as Terrible search engine, even ChatGPT preforms better.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they're surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask "hey, what's that 80s horror comedy that's kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?" I go to a chatbot.

EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:

The movie you are referring to is "Ghoulies." It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I find this fascinating because that seems like the most difficult of the 3 to do for a normal search engine and sounds like an incredibly useful tool, but everybody and their mother seems to only care about whether it can do the other 2 or if you can trick it into spilling military secrets.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Well, yeah. So much of this conversation has gotten really dumb, with both advocates and detractors misrepresenting the tech and its capabilities and applying it to the wrong uses and applications as a result.

Honestly, early on I did think as a summary service for search queries it'd be more useful than it ended up being. It quickly became obvious that without the search results onscreen you basically have to fact check every piece of info you get, so it's only really useful to find answers you already know but had forgotten or that you need a source for.

But hey, at least I noticed that it kinda isn't before I built it as a key part of Windows. At this point if I was going to build a search app around this tech I'd use it for a short summary to replace Google's little blurb cards and still give you the raw results immediately below. It's only really good at parsing a wonky search prompt into a more accurate query. That's why when I have to use one of these I go to Perplexity instead of raw ChatGPT or Bing or whatever, it's the one that's built the most like that, although you still end up having to argue with it when it insists on being wrong and gets sidetracked by its own mistakes.