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This is probably going to really bug people, but it seems foolish to use chatgpt as your search engine. You really have to have a more critical eye than say loo

by Alive-in-2025 2y ago

This is probably going to really bug people, but it seems foolish to use chatgpt as your search engine. You really have to have a more critical eye than say looking at wikipedia or a search result from a reputable website. I was telling both my son and my father about how chatgpt is not a search engine, and they started testing things and .... well the obvious happened, they easily found mistakes. And they stopped using it so much. They had no idea it wasn't kind of a search engine. I can ask it questions and get amazing answers, I see the use of it. But it's not a search engine replacement, you have to double check things with search engines. A search engine might return a result with a bogus webpage of course. People don't know that it's not a search engine! It's much more, but it's also a bit less ;-)

est31 2y ago
Search engines also return websites with mistakes, sometimes even the stuff they quote directly in their search. But the good part is that they can put the blame onto the individual website if it's wrong. Similarly, you can also use the kind of website to figure out if it's a good source or not. I don't like the LLM interface that it's all filtered to this super friendly, grammatically correct reply that might however make no actual sense logically, or be plain wrong. With websites I see tons of signals I can use to determine how much value I should put to some information, I can compare different websites, etc. Also, it's super slow to return a response. Maybe I'm old, but for most of the tasks I use search engines for, I wouldn't use LLM's.
satisfice 2y ago
When someone writes or says that they use ChatGPT for a search engine, that just tells me they aren’t serious about facts or education. Anyone who invests two minutes in crosschecking will easily find disturbing misinformation in its “search results.” Meanwhile, Duck Duck Go provides reasonable sources. After rather extensive testing, my heuristic is never to ask ChatGPT for facts about anything that can’t be readily verified— and even then don’t trust it until it is verified. The act of verification makes ChatGPT too time consuming to be worth using for education. It’s useful when I’m trying to solve certain programming problems, though.
- jmye 2y ago
  Yep - I love ChatGPT for “conversation starter” analysis and ideas. I think it works well to help me figure out what my question is (a program isn’t working and the error message is generic), or to refine something I’ve written or test me with questions. I cannot imagine using it as a primary source for literally anything, ever.

est31 2y ago

Search engines also return websites with mistakes, sometimes even the stuff they quote directly in their search. But the good part is that they can put the blame onto the individual website if it's wrong. Similarly, you can also use the kind of website to figure out if it's a good source or not. I don't like the LLM interface that it's all filtered to this super friendly, grammatically correct reply that might however make no actual sense logically, or be plain wrong. With websites I see tons of signals I can use to determine how much value I should put to some information, I can compare different websites, etc. Also, it's super slow to return a response. Maybe I'm old, but for most of the tasks I use search engines for, I wouldn't use LLM's.

satisfice 2y ago

When someone writes or says that they use ChatGPT for a search engine, that just tells me they aren’t serious about facts or education. Anyone who invests two minutes in crosschecking will easily find disturbing misinformation in its “search results.” Meanwhile, Duck Duck Go provides reasonable sources. After rather extensive testing, my heuristic is never to ask ChatGPT for facts about anything that can’t be readily verified— and even then don’t trust it until it is verified. The act of verification makes ChatGPT too time consuming to be worth using for education. It’s useful when I’m trying to solve certain programming problems, though.

jmye 2y ago
Yep - I love ChatGPT for “conversation starter” analysis and ideas. I think it works well to help me figure out what my question is (a program isn’t working and the error message is generic), or to refine something I’ve written or test me with questions. I cannot imagine using it as a primary source for literally anything, ever.