4 ms·
A basic test is to ask how quickly you can find information about a topic that is unbiased by commercial interests. On some topics it's nearly impossible: - me
by ants_everywhere 3y ago
A basic test is to ask how quickly you can find information about a topic that is unbiased by commercial interests.
On some topics it's nearly impossible:
- medicine
- cosmetics
- cooking/nutrition/recipes
For many other topics, it's only really possible by finding forums where people who are not blog spammer discuss things. This used to be possible by appending "reddit" to a search term, but this is getting harder as Reddit's quality is decreasing.
- Forgeties79 3y agoI mean in all fairness, name one unbiased source you’ve heard of ever.
- MeImCounting 3y agoThere are other search engines than google. I really have no problem finding what Im looking for except when I use google.
- MarioCircuit 3y agoGenuine question - this isn't some "gotcha" sarcastic comment - but what search engines do you use that are an actual improvement? The only one I know is Marginalia, which I love, but is more of a discovery tool for old sites than for actual relevant information.
- bruce511 3y agoFor a range of questions - ones which are complex to distill for google, I'm using ChatGPT occasionally. I recently wanted to understand better the position of the rising and setting sun, and it did an excellent job of explaining where my mental model of the sun was inaccurate.
- MeImCounting 3y agoKagi is the big one. LLMs are useful for a specific subset of topics and questions. But mostly I do use KAgi
- serf 3y agoGoogle created the situation, but it's not the reason why data is held behind login/pay-walls everywhere across the net.
- bruce511 3y ago>> A basic test is to ask how quickly you can find information about a topic that is unbiased by commercial interests. I'm not really sure that test tells you anything about the state of the web in general, and less the state of the internet, other than (perhaps) how good one site is at one specific query. Plus you've picked categories (medicine, cosmetics, nutrition) which are rife with commercial interests, endless fringe theories, and plenty of "bad science". And, to be honest, the searches I've done for recipes over the past few years have all been very successful. But hey, maybe I'm lucky.