I was watching the RFK Jr questioning today and when Bernie was talking about healthcare and wages I felt he was the only one who gave a real damn. I also thought “Wow he’s kinda old” so I asked my phone how old he actually was. Gemini however, wouldnt answer a simple, factual question about him. What the hell? (The answer is 83 years old btw, good luck america)
I mostly can’t understand why people are so into “LLMs as a substitute for Web search”, though there are a bunch of generative AI applications that I do think are great. I eventually realized that for people who want to use their cell phone via voice, LLM queries can be done without hands or eyes getting involved. Web searches cannot.
Because web search was intentionally hobbled by Google so people are pushed to make more searches and see more ads.
I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:
DDG and Ecosia are proxies for Bing. I didn’t check, but I’m guessing the others are too. Most “independent” search engines are.
The major exception is Startpage, which is a proxy for Google.
Marginalia is not.
Marginalia and Million Short have their own index as far as I know. Fireball is another one being independent from both Google and Bing.
startpage is a proxy for google?
Do any of them actually work? As in, you search something and it gives you relevant results to the whole thing you typed in?
I’ve used DuckDuckGo for a long time, so I would say yes. But the best way to figure that out is just to try it for a while. There is literally nothing to lose.
I have been using it for about 7 years and its just as shit.
It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.
Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.
The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).
Web search by voice was a solved problem in my recent memory. Then it got shitty again
google literally has a voice button.
The problem isn’t conducting the search with voice, it’s receiving any actual information back. A few years ago I would ask a question and receive an answer based off the top few results, and if it couldn’t scrape something together it would just give me the results instead.
I haven’t used voice search in a while because of the issues that started to arise, but I have less fond memories of “hey Siri, answer this.” And then having to go find my phone anyway to Google it because she was useless
Would saying “Gemini, open the Wikipedia page for Bernie Sanders and read me the age it says he is”, for example, suffice as a voice input that both bypasses subject limitations and evades AI bullshitting?
Gemini refuses to answer
Copilot seems to know the current date and calculates the age from that
ChatGPT is clueless
Idk if it bypasses limitations, you can try. As for bullshiting, no. The AI almost certainly does not have the ability to go and open a webpage. If it was trained on wikipedia, it may or may not give you the age listed at the time of it’s training. If not, it will likely take a different source and pretend it is from wikipedia. Either way, it will likely bullshit you about doing what you asked while giving you outdated/missourced information.
Now the number may be correct, I imagine Bernies real age is readily available, but it will confidently lie about how it got the information.