Well, google has become utterly bad at its job — I fail to find sites I remember verbatim quotes from, so expert google-usage is no longer a possibility. It will gladly leave out any of your important keywords, even if you add quotes around it, absolutely useless. Sure, the average person will search for “how old is X” not “x age”, but for more complex queries the first form is not a good fit.

That said, I can’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine, but I did plug it into a self-hosted telegram bot and I do ask it some basic questions from time to time - telegram is a good UI for it.

Yeah, I agree. Google did a lot of work to make ChatGPT useful. It's clearly worse than it used to be.

I usually need someone to explain something to me. And I used Google before to land on a site where I could find the explanation (e.g. how to use a library). ChatGPT can explain most things I need and I can skip Google and the other sites. But it's indeed not a search engine, if you need factual information then your best bet is to find the documentations, articles, databases, etc.

I tried phind after seeing it linked here a few times. It felt like it was a slower Google search with extra steps. The sources it used for the answers were the sources I would have found by searching "site:stackoverflow.com [my question]". It did distill the information decently well, but I'm skeptical it properly pulls in the context that the comment replies to the question/answers provides

Given how much it hallucinates, that's one very scary echo chamber to be in where you trust info reinterpreted by an algorithm instead of just reading it yourself. Yikes.

It rarely hallucinates for me. But you need to know what it's capable of and how to use it to work effectively with it. You can't use it well if you think it's an all knowing sentient AI.

How would you know how frequently it hallucinates if it has "mostly replaced Google" for you? Are you fact-checking all your queries? This is a very strange self-inflicted echo chamber.

Because the code it generates is working? The recipes it gave to me are also delicious and I don't even have to read someone's life story on a blog before getting to the recipe.

Not really sure why you are so fixated on the echo chamber thing. We are on the internet! The biggest echo chamber humanity has ever built.

Functional or delicious ≠ accurate to the source material.

Because it's a layer of abstraction, mate. One known to get things wrong, because it's an LLM. If I write a post about Richard Stallman's opinions on paedophilia and Jeffrey Epstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies), and it incorrectly tells you that Stallman associated directly with Epstein, or is a paedophile himself, that would not be accurate to the source.

At least with a Google search result you can go more directly to the source. If the scientific method is getting to the truth, why on Earth would you put an obstacle in front of it?

If someone tells me x, am I going to believe them? No. So, why would I believe an LLM if it isn't presenting sources to me that are 1:1 in accuracy to the information it presents to me?

> Functional or delicious ≠ accurate to the source material.

Alright, but most people aren't looking for accuracy relative to the source material.

They're looking for code that does a specific thing, or food that tastes a certain way.

> If the scientific method is getting to the truth, why on Earth would you put an obstacle in front of it?

Possibly because they aren't doing science. They may be doing software development or baking instead.

Yup, and it hallucinates plenty with dev too, even over basic stuff like an NGINX config.

Given that it hallucinates in particular over measurements/specs/stats, I'd be extremely sceptical of taking a recipe from it, whether that's generated and original or coming from a known source.

Baking requires very specific measurements, the slightest mistake and it won't turn out well in most cases. Again, why go via an LLM and not a search engine to the actual source? It makes zero sense, especially if it only returns text and you can't see what the recipe produces if it's an existing thing.

> Again, why go via an LLM and not a search engine to the actual source?

I believe the argument presented (possibly in a separate thread) was that search engines have degraded to the point where what they show you is worse than LLM output.

There's no such thing as "the actual source" for how to make a type of food.