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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Whenever I have a tech problem, I add reddit to google search. That's the only way to get good answers from google. This worked great until their API scam.
After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google. But with what?
I switched to Duckduckgo recently. So far it works good and gives me helpful results. Can’t give long time Test results, using it since a week. But I think it gets the job done.
I was very happy am that Apple added it as a default option in iOS. I had been using it off and on for years but now it’s been my default in various browsers for I guess about 3-4 years. Generally I find what I want with no problem, but still need to append !g and get the results from Google for some searches. Maybe about 10%, and more often on image searches.
That is really good to hear! I also added it as default search engine in safari and brave since I switched. Thought I have to go full in in order to give it a chance. Where exactly do you add the „!g“?
Anywhere in the search string works, and then it redirects you to google.
Oh, and the feature is called “bangs”. I knew there were a good handful of them but apparently there are a ton! Over 13,000?
https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
The "!g" is part of something called "bangs" on DuckDuckGo. Bangs are prefixes to redirect your query to another search engine. For example "!g How to pet a cat" will redirect you to Google, searching for "How to pet a cat"
Other useful bangs are "!m" for maps, "!gi" for Google images, "!so" for stack overflow.
You can find more about it at the bangs page: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Been using it exclusively for years with no issues.
Same, I've never found it to be significantly worse than google except in AI-aided features like Reverse Image Search.
I was using ddg for a while but got fed up with the kinda shit results.. swapped over to brave search and it seems much better, but not 100% sure if it's got the privacy behind it like ddg does.. have you got any experience with brave search?
I think DuckDuckGo has gotten way better, and Google has gotten way worse. I tend to use DG for most search needs and then append !g to go to Google if the search doesn’t meet my needs.
I'm thinking of giving Ecosia another go, since I really appreciate their whole "use the whole net income to plant trees" thing. Just gotta check out how well their algorithm does at this point.
CHATGPT, although it sometimes lie so need to take it with a grain of salt
chatgpt will make up believable bs on spot if you ask it about anything remotely obscure
It is slightly confusing to me why everyone was insisting ChatGPT was a threat to Google and that it would replace Google search. They don’t seem like comparable products.
If you imagine users asking questions to Google just to recieve a bunch of crappy listicles or the wiki page, versus ChatGPT, it makes more sense.
ChatGPT enables you to have a dialogue to ask follow up questions, more detail or summarize information in two sentences. Google can’t compete with that using a page-rank algorithm alone. It is incredibly powerful and it’s getting exponentially better.
I’d caution anyone who just dismisses it by calling it a chatbot or says it hallucinates too much. I found the accuracy between 3.5 to 4 pretty astonishing to the point where I now fear the AGI apocalypse.
Honestly for certain things that I was already knowledgable about, it provided a really great and accurate summary when I asked. Other times not so much, so I don’t feel comfortable using it for research like that.
I think if it could base its output on real sources and direct you to them it would be a bit better
It can help, but it's data is sometimes too old.
Hah. Imagine if you went to Wikipedia and had to account for that 40% of all info on there was straight made up. Like the Scots wikipedia.
LLMs are far better at writing things that look like answers than they are at writing actual answers.