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>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be

>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back in the day but the websites which are the most popular are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal with search results. On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT type search engine will be more suitable for people who are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to "Google" and go through search results and look around the web for the helpful and useful information.

bagasme 3y ago
Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).
- mrkramer 3y ago
  I've tried ChatGPT inside Microsoft's Bing search engine and it is pretty good so far. It definitely saved me time that I would lose clicking on search results and skimming through websites looking for useful information.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? I mean yes there is description of a search result but that doesn't tell you very much about the website or the quality of information that you are getting. Bing did a good thing with their annotations[0] because my thinking is that something like annotations lower the complexity of browsing and skimming through search results. [0] https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-Now-Smarter-on-Microsoft-Bing https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? They don't all look the same. They all tend to go to different places. I find that it's reasonably easy to spot a great deal of garbage sites just from their domain name or url, and that weeds out a large chunk. Ignoring multiple results for the same site also weeds out a large chunk (I only need one of them). The rest, I just click on and take a look at the page. It's pretty quick and easy to weed out most of the garbage ones with a quick skim. The rest, I sample, read captions and boxes, skim paragraphs and such to determine if it's along the lines of what I want. That's pretty quick too. For the most part, it's the same process that you use when researching in a library. The reason that I want to do this myself rather than outsourcing it is because I'll inevitably learn something in the process that will shift my viewpoint to one that's more targeted or meaningful for the purpose I have in searching. It doesn't matter how good the engine is at collating and summarizing results -- even if it's perfect, my understanding not only of what I'm looking to learn, but also discovery of important but serendipitous or unexpected knowledge, is lessened. It's a bit like the difference between reading Cliff's (or Cole's) Notes about a book and reading the book.

bagasme 3y ago

Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).

mrkramer 3y ago
I've tried ChatGPT inside Microsoft's Bing search engine and it is pretty good so far. It definitely saved me time that I would lose clicking on search results and skimming through websites looking for useful information.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. This is exactly what I don't want a search engine to do for me. Going through the list of results and evaluating them is an important part of my process, if what I'm trying to do is learn something new.

mrkramer 3y ago
So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? I mean yes there is description of a search result but that doesn't tell you very much about the website or the quality of information that you are getting. Bing did a good thing with their annotations[0] because my thinking is that something like annotations lower the complexity of browsing and skimming through search results. [0] https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-Now-Smarter-on-Microsoft-Bing https://blogs.bing.com/search/2022-08/Shopping-Searches-are-...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > So how do you differentiate blue links that all look the same? They don't all look the same. They all tend to go to different places. I find that it's reasonably easy to spot a great deal of garbage sites just from their domain name or url, and that weeds out a large chunk. Ignoring multiple results for the same site also weeds out a large chunk (I only need one of them). The rest, I just click on and take a look at the page. It's pretty quick and easy to weed out most of the garbage ones with a quick skim. The rest, I sample, read captions and boxes, skim paragraphs and such to determine if it's along the lines of what I want. That's pretty quick too. For the most part, it's the same process that you use when researching in a library. The reason that I want to do this myself rather than outsourcing it is because I'll inevitably learn something in the process that will shift my viewpoint to one that's more targeted or meaningful for the purpose I have in searching. It doesn't matter how good the engine is at collating and summarizing results -- even if it's perfect, my understanding not only of what I'm looking to learn, but also discovery of important but serendipitous or unexpected knowledge, is lessened. It's a bit like the difference between reading Cliff's (or Cole's) Notes about a book and reading the book.