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The first 5 minutes complaining about ads would've been best served by suggesting an adblocker removing all of them But near the end of the segment "Google wit

by eviks 2y ago

The first 5 minutes complaining about ads would've been best served by suggesting an adblocker removing all of them But near the end of the segment "Google with its ... level of intelligence... data... has the ability... to the single best rated product" (a great example of this is trying to find "world's most comfortable chair") This is unadulterated magic thinking. There is no such thing as "single best" product in any diverse category, especially when you want something so subjective as "comfort". Even if understood literally as "best rated" where theoretically you could have the highest number, there is no source where you could get this number from. With this fantasy level of Google fu I seriously doubt the author could make an accurate quality assessment of search results besides the "ads take more space now"

jemmyw 2y ago
I didn't really get that, his point was that you could no longer find independent review sites. "world's most comfortable chair" is just the kind of thing someone might search for when they want reviews by people who've actually tried out chairs.
- eviks 2y ago
  yours is a different point. But if someone used that query expecting tech pixie dust magic resulting in the single best answer, he'd be just as wrong as this videoblogger.
dredmorbius 2y ago
Keep in mind that on Android, the default browser (Chrome) doesn't support extensions, which excludes adblock (or at least makes it considerably less convenient, e.g., setting up PiHole or equivalent on the device). And Google Search's past* behaviour was far less toxic. NB: I've relied all but entirely on DDG search for over a decade. I'm increasingly finding FastGPT from Kagi useful for search-framed-as-question, though the answers have to be carefully vetted. One advantage of Kagi's LLM is that it provides references for its answers making vetting far more straightforward than with, say, OpenAI's LLM.
- eviks 2y ago
  Sure it's not very convenient, but adblockers still exist, and the author had enough time to show the full install procedure And my criticism isn't about toxicity as in "ads are bigger", but search result quality, where the level of degradation is an open question. Like with your DDG example: I've tried to switch to it permanently for all search many times, but couldn't because found many instances where Google was just better (think DDG is mostly Bing, which isn't better vs Google)
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    For a long time my significant use case for Google Web Search (GWS) was date-ranged search. DDG had relative bounds (past day/week/month/year), but not a custom range. That changed a couple of years back, and has been excellent. Now it's mostly really old websites, > ~20 years. Here Google's crawl still seems more robust than DDG's / Bing's. (And yes, DDG leans heavily on Bing.) Again, I use DDG and retry failed searches via !g bang search. But that's rarely any better. FastGPT via Kagi is transformational in that I can ask questions and get answers, rather than turning up web pages. Kagi's GPT adds links which reference its sources, which is hugely more useful than ChatGPT in my experience. FastGPT still occasionally hallucinates, but its sources can be much more readily verified. ChatGPT OTOH, hallucinates sources when requested to provide them.

by eviks 2y ago

jemmyw 2y ago

I didn't really get that, his point was that you could no longer find independent review sites. "world's most comfortable chair" is just the kind of thing someone might search for when they want reviews by people who've actually tried out chairs.

eviks 2y ago
yours is a different point. But if someone used that query expecting tech pixie dust magic resulting in the single best answer, he'd be just as wrong as this videoblogger.

dredmorbius 2y ago

Keep in mind that on Android, the default browser (Chrome) doesn't support extensions, which excludes adblock (or at least makes it considerably less convenient, e.g., setting up PiHole or equivalent on the device). And Google Search's past* behaviour was far less toxic. NB: I've relied all but entirely on DDG search for over a decade. I'm increasingly finding FastGPT from Kagi useful for search-framed-as-question, though the answers have to be carefully vetted. One advantage of Kagi's LLM is that it provides references for its answers making vetting far more straightforward than with, say, OpenAI's LLM.

eviks 2y ago
Sure it's not very convenient, but adblockers still exist, and the author had enough time to show the full install procedure And my criticism isn't about toxicity as in "ads are bigger", but search result quality, where the level of degradation is an open question. Like with your DDG example: I've tried to switch to it permanently for all search many times, but couldn't because found many instances where Google was just better (think DDG is mostly Bing, which isn't better vs Google)
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  For a long time my significant use case for Google Web Search (GWS) was date-ranged search. DDG had relative bounds (past day/week/month/year), but not a custom range. That changed a couple of years back, and has been excellent. Now it's mostly really old websites, > ~20 years. Here Google's crawl still seems more robust than DDG's / Bing's. (And yes, DDG leans heavily on Bing.) Again, I use DDG and retry failed searches via !g bang search. But that's rarely any better. FastGPT via Kagi is transformational in that I can ask questions and get answers, rather than turning up web pages. Kagi's GPT adds links which reference its sources, which is hugely more useful than ChatGPT in my experience. FastGPT still occasionally hallucinates, but its sources can be much more readily verified. ChatGPT OTOH, hallucinates sources when requested to provide them.