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I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. I’ve seen a few examples that breathlessly proclaimed that they literally saved lives or sa

I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. I’ve seen a few examples that breathlessly proclaimed that they literally saved lives or saved hours of time, but when I typed the 3 most obvious keywords from their input into Google, the first result always has the answer right there.

mejutoco 4y ago
The other day I asked chatgpt about a Polish supermarket with a logo in a certain color and an animal in it. I could not remember the name. We continued our conversation until it was clear I was misremembering some things (I thought the name started with x letter, and that was false). Eventually chatgpt suggested the correct one. The search was something like: "Polish supermarket with red and white logo and a bird in the logo, that begins with the letter K". The first google result to wikipedia has it, to be fair, but without this back and forth idk if I would have found it.
- tapland 4y ago
  It’s extremely wild to see this obfuscated with the wrong colors, animal and name, when it’s just a common grocery store chain in Poland.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Ah, but ChatGPT is trained mostly on English materials.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    That is literally what I remembered about the supermarket, so that is what I searched. It is a supermarket in Poland, not a Polish one I believe. P.S. It was not Biedronka! it was Auchan, and I thought Auchan started with K, because of the bird.
ralfn 4y ago
I never have a search problem. I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product. I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve. Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to: - deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine - deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications - deal with things being phrased disingenuously - deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself! I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts. Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions. Examples: - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro - send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro I imagine this will go about as well as if you chose to purchase an apartment purely on the basis of the real estate agency's description.
  - ralfn 4y ago
    This is what I do now on booking.com. If you have a smarter strategy let me know. But whatever the strategy is: it can be automated. I also spent a lot more time on the choice where I live than the hotel in going to stay at for a week. Weird. And although ChatGPT currently doesn't have up to date information about hotels or the ability to book it (a simple booking.com plugin would enable that though), it is smart enough to either pick a hotel with remote working facilities or consider one with coworking spaces nearby.
vidarh 4y ago
Ask for something more specific and bespoke. I've e.g. had it produce the HTML, CSS and basic web app for a site I was putting together. Custom, with my content and the layout and design I wanted. None of it was stuff I couldn't do myself from scratch without even a Google search, but it wrote out an hour or two's worth of boilerplate in a few minutes of prompting.
roberttod 4y ago
I think you need to try it out, with GPT4, because it is so obviously much better than Google. Simple queries are fine with Google, not much difference, but especially for things like coding problems (where you can e.g. specify the environment you are running in) it has always responded with the correct answer the first time. It's already saving me over an hour a day, and as far as I understand there is much more things it can do I am not using.
- nwienert 4y ago
  I'm genuinely asking for a good example here. I've tried a bunch and every time I find Google about 100x faster. I think GPT is good for some things, but search and recommendations it's like going back in time.
  - ralfn 4y ago
    Here are some of my questions of today: > We need to travel by train from Rome to Montpellier, but it is too many stops to do at once. So we would like to stay somewhere for a day in between Rome and Montpellier. What are our options? It needs to be safe, not adding a lot of extra travel time and suitable for a workathon It returns with four options, approximate travel times and advantages and disadvantages. It understood coworking cafes or bussiness hotels would be a requirement. > What are all the places an SSL certificate could be cached when calling an API from a Jupiter notebook? It mentioned some obvious things such OS/browser/network-device, but also that a particular python package exists that is doing this at the application level as well, but only in memory and that a restart of the Jupiter kernel would resolve that. Now, I'm curious with what kind of keywords I could get meaningful output from Google for these two examples. What i suspect is happening is that you are micro managing your chat as if it's search. Picking keywords rather than just telling it the problem you are actually trying to solve. Splitting up your problem in sub problems and then trying to find each peace of information manually and combining it yourself to form a conclusion.
    - rstuart4133 4y ago
      > It returns with four options, approximate travel times and advantages and disadvantages. This trust in it's response reminds me early days of the internet. That would be the time when the people who created it were just exploring what the technology could do. It was a wonderful time. People posted amazing HOWTO's to Usenet that were chock full of useful information, you only received email from like minded friends, and almost nothing was censored and most of it was useful. It looked like the future was bright. But then it grew so big you could not recognise most of the sources, and into that void stepped content aggregators like MySpace and Facebook I refuse to go near, and Alta Vista started ranking stuff by how much they were paid. Usenet was overrun by lies from spammers as was my inbox. And now if I don't run an ad-blocker, I find it difficult to differentiate Google's search results from the ads at the top, and near bloody impossible on sites like Amazon, and GMail / Hotmail mines my personal correspondence for ways to manipulate me. And so it will be with those concise AI responses. Except you have absolutely no way to cross verify - you only get what a machine that will likely be far smarted than any of us wants you to know, in order to maximise it's profit. Thank you, but I'll pass.
stravant 4y ago
Recipes. Oh my god, have you tried to search for a recipe before? Pages and pages and pages of bloated garbage. I just want ingredients and steps goddamnit.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Recipe websites got the point, back when Google AdSense used to pay out properly. Google slashed those payouts to the bone, which led to recipe sites lengthening their web pages with paragraphs, so they could fit in more ads to compensate for the reduction in payouts. Something similar will happen here. Today, recipes on Chatgpt are to the point. Tomorrow, they might start adding affiliate links to the ingredients. A year from now, the experience won't be any better than what you currently have on Google.
  - bleep_bloop 4y ago
    >Something similar will happen here. Today, recipes on Chatgpt are to the point. Tomorrow, they might start adding affiliate links to the ingredients. A year from now, the experience won't be any better than what you currently have on Google. Correct me if I've misinterpreted your comment but it appears you're suggesting that rather than use something that is a superior product in more than one factor, you're advocating for using a product that is terrible in many factors just because... The superior product might get worse... Eventually... Blind loyalty to a corporation no matter how terrible they make my experience and abuse my trust isn't really something I'm desperate to cling on to. There is a thirst for ChatGPT for a reason. Nothing is stopping OpenAI from pulling all the same anti-consumer behaviour that Google pulls today, but then the field is wide open for someone to come along and pull a ChatGPT on them, and the cycle continues.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      I'm not advocating for Google at all, they have written the book on how to ruin a good thing with greed. OpenAI will use the same playbook, and possibly more rapidly than Google did. If anything, I'm advocating for a perspective on technology that goes beyond dunking on incumbents because the newer, sleeker thing has arrived. Look at the economics of this industry and the motives of the market entrants; the new thing is only a donut or two or away from turning into the same bloated mess as those it sought to replace.
kernal 4y ago
>I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. Until ChatGPT has the ability to index at the scale of Google it never will be.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
I've had the complete opposite experience. Hallucinations aside (more common with bad prompts or niche/specific topics), ChatGPT 3.5 has been perfect for searching anything that isn't past the model's cut-off date, as well as summurizing long articles I don't have the time or patience to read. Google on the other hand, is at a point where even Yandex of all search engines is starting to give better results, especially when it comes to image searching and content Google doesn't like as much like piracy. Google used to be amazing back in the day, nowadays I find myself having to specify REDDIT (or a specific forum) on my searches because the top results without it are hardly ever good.
andrewljohnson 4y ago
It’s faster for coding.
shakow 4y ago
I can give you my trivial experience from a couple of days ago: Google: > latex macro behaves differently math mode normal mode ChatGPT: > How can I make a LaTeX macro behaves differently in math mode and normal mode? Google failed, ChatGPT succeeded instantly. Now that's but a single data point, but I found it cute.

mejutoco 4y ago

The other day I asked chatgpt about a Polish supermarket with a logo in a certain color and an animal in it. I could not remember the name. We continued our conversation until it was clear I was misremembering some things (I thought the name started with x letter, and that was false). Eventually chatgpt suggested the correct one. The search was something like: "Polish supermarket with red and white logo and a bird in the logo, that begins with the letter K". The first google result to wikipedia has it, to be fair, but without this back and forth idk if I would have found it.

tapland 4y ago
It’s extremely wild to see this obfuscated with the wrong colors, animal and name, when it’s just a common grocery store chain in Poland.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Ah, but ChatGPT is trained mostly on English materials.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  That is literally what I remembered about the supermarket, so that is what I searched. It is a supermarket in Poland, not a Polish one I believe. P.S. It was not Biedronka! it was Auchan, and I thought Auchan started with K, because of the bird.

ralfn 4y ago

I never have a search problem. I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product. I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve. Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to: - deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine - deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications - deal with things being phrased disingenuously - deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself! I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts. Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions. Examples: - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro - send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.

rchaud 4y ago
> - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro I imagine this will go about as well as if you chose to purchase an apartment purely on the basis of the real estate agency's description.
- ralfn 4y ago
  This is what I do now on booking.com. If you have a smarter strategy let me know. But whatever the strategy is: it can be automated. I also spent a lot more time on the choice where I live than the hotel in going to stay at for a week. Weird. And although ChatGPT currently doesn't have up to date information about hotels or the ability to book it (a simple booking.com plugin would enable that though), it is smart enough to either pick a hotel with remote working facilities or consider one with coworking spaces nearby.

vidarh 4y ago

Ask for something more specific and bespoke. I've e.g. had it produce the HTML, CSS and basic web app for a site I was putting together. Custom, with my content and the layout and design I wanted. None of it was stuff I couldn't do myself from scratch without even a Google search, but it wrote out an hour or two's worth of boilerplate in a few minutes of prompting.

roberttod 4y ago

I think you need to try it out, with GPT4, because it is so obviously much better than Google. Simple queries are fine with Google, not much difference, but especially for things like coding problems (where you can e.g. specify the environment you are running in) it has always responded with the correct answer the first time. It's already saving me over an hour a day, and as far as I understand there is much more things it can do I am not using.

nwienert 4y ago
I'm genuinely asking for a good example here. I've tried a bunch and every time I find Google about 100x faster. I think GPT is good for some things, but search and recommendations it's like going back in time.
- ralfn 4y ago
  Here are some of my questions of today: > We need to travel by train from Rome to Montpellier, but it is too many stops to do at once. So we would like to stay somewhere for a day in between Rome and Montpellier. What are our options? It needs to be safe, not adding a lot of extra travel time and suitable for a workathon It returns with four options, approximate travel times and advantages and disadvantages. It understood coworking cafes or bussiness hotels would be a requirement. > What are all the places an SSL certificate could be cached when calling an API from a Jupiter notebook? It mentioned some obvious things such OS/browser/network-device, but also that a particular python package exists that is doing this at the application level as well, but only in memory and that a restart of the Jupiter kernel would resolve that. Now, I'm curious with what kind of keywords I could get meaningful output from Google for these two examples. What i suspect is happening is that you are micro managing your chat as if it's search. Picking keywords rather than just telling it the problem you are actually trying to solve. Splitting up your problem in sub problems and then trying to find each peace of information manually and combining it yourself to form a conclusion.
  - rstuart4133 4y ago
    > It returns with four options, approximate travel times and advantages and disadvantages. This trust in it's response reminds me early days of the internet. That would be the time when the people who created it were just exploring what the technology could do. It was a wonderful time. People posted amazing HOWTO's to Usenet that were chock full of useful information, you only received email from like minded friends, and almost nothing was censored and most of it was useful. It looked like the future was bright. But then it grew so big you could not recognise most of the sources, and into that void stepped content aggregators like MySpace and Facebook I refuse to go near, and Alta Vista started ranking stuff by how much they were paid. Usenet was overrun by lies from spammers as was my inbox. And now if I don't run an ad-blocker, I find it difficult to differentiate Google's search results from the ads at the top, and near bloody impossible on sites like Amazon, and GMail / Hotmail mines my personal correspondence for ways to manipulate me. And so it will be with those concise AI responses. Except you have absolutely no way to cross verify - you only get what a machine that will likely be far smarted than any of us wants you to know, in order to maximise it's profit. Thank you, but I'll pass.

stravant 4y ago

Recipes. Oh my god, have you tried to search for a recipe before? Pages and pages and pages of bloated garbage. I just want ingredients and steps goddamnit.

rchaud 4y ago
Recipe websites got the point, back when Google AdSense used to pay out properly. Google slashed those payouts to the bone, which led to recipe sites lengthening their web pages with paragraphs, so they could fit in more ads to compensate for the reduction in payouts. Something similar will happen here. Today, recipes on Chatgpt are to the point. Tomorrow, they might start adding affiliate links to the ingredients. A year from now, the experience won't be any better than what you currently have on Google.
- bleep_bloop 4y ago
  >Something similar will happen here. Today, recipes on Chatgpt are to the point. Tomorrow, they might start adding affiliate links to the ingredients. A year from now, the experience won't be any better than what you currently have on Google. Correct me if I've misinterpreted your comment but it appears you're suggesting that rather than use something that is a superior product in more than one factor, you're advocating for using a product that is terrible in many factors just because... The superior product might get worse... Eventually... Blind loyalty to a corporation no matter how terrible they make my experience and abuse my trust isn't really something I'm desperate to cling on to. There is a thirst for ChatGPT for a reason. Nothing is stopping OpenAI from pulling all the same anti-consumer behaviour that Google pulls today, but then the field is wide open for someone to come along and pull a ChatGPT on them, and the cycle continues.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I'm not advocating for Google at all, they have written the book on how to ruin a good thing with greed. OpenAI will use the same playbook, and possibly more rapidly than Google did. If anything, I'm advocating for a perspective on technology that goes beyond dunking on incumbents because the newer, sleeker thing has arrived. Look at the economics of this industry and the motives of the market entrants; the new thing is only a donut or two or away from turning into the same bloated mess as those it sought to replace.

kernal 4y ago

>I’ve yet to see an example of *GPT be better at search than Google. Until ChatGPT has the ability to index at the scale of Google it never will be.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lemoncookiechip 4y ago

I've had the complete opposite experience. Hallucinations aside (more common with bad prompts or niche/specific topics), ChatGPT 3.5 has been perfect for searching anything that isn't past the model's cut-off date, as well as summurizing long articles I don't have the time or patience to read. Google on the other hand, is at a point where even Yandex of all search engines is starting to give better results, especially when it comes to image searching and content Google doesn't like as much like piracy. Google used to be amazing back in the day, nowadays I find myself having to specify REDDIT (or a specific forum) on my searches because the top results without it are hardly ever good.

andrewljohnson 4y ago

It’s faster for coding.

shakow 4y ago

I can give you my trivial experience from a couple of days ago: Google: > latex macro behaves differently math mode normal mode ChatGPT: > How can I make a LaTeX macro behaves differently in math mode and normal mode? Google failed, ChatGPT succeeded instantly. Now that's but a single data point, but I found it cute.