This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Google results have gotten less useful, but one reason for that is that there is an ever growing sea of AI generated articles out there trying to hijack searches. In a way, Bing is just cutting out the middle man.
I enjoy playing with ChatGPT as much as the next guy, but it isn't a search engine. Hooking Bing up to an LLM just means that I now have to verify that the results it spits out aren't hallucinations, assuming it understood what I was asking in the first place.
BinGPT took a list of restaurants gave me all their hours and then formatted it into a nice markdown table for me.
Only issue is that at least one of the restaurants had the wrong hours (though I believe this was because I included notes with each restaurant and they confused it)
Still, it was nice not having to do 20 inividual searches and do the formatting manually
I used Bing to get coordinates for every postal code in the British postal system. As long as I didn't ask for too many at once, it would give it to me in a convenient table. And each one seems to have been accurate, at least for the ones I checked.
But on the other hand, I tried asking it to look up some Pathfinder homebrew, and even though it could give me the link to the exact document I wanted, and it definitely saw the content, it was absolutely incapable of giving accurate information. It would give statblocks that were formatted correctly but had the wrong numbers, and abilities that either shouldn't be there at all, or with the right name but the wrong rules, either because it made up a plausible sounding entry or because it was bringing in the d&d version. I even tried asking it to tell me about a series of feats in one of these documents, and it would make up its own feats that matched the naming scheme instead of giving me the feats in the document it was referencing.
The inability to reliably quote things is a bit of problem for something that wants to be a search engine.
What i noticed with bingpt is that it can only handle stuff it can actually find. I asked it to look for open foodplaces while knowing they where all closed and it hallucinated three that didn’t exist.
Ironically the reverse, chatgpt with bing integration seems to do a slightly better job.
The issue with direct LLM integration with web search is: They serve two different purposes. I dont search for things and want a GPT response. Likewise, I dont go to cahtgpt and want search results.
It might seem like a weird distinction but I use them differently and when you mush them together they become less useful overall.
Posting an error message into search may or may not get me a root cause or fix, but pasting it into chatgpt will very likely get me on the right track very quickly. Searching for a product I know exists is a pita on chat GPT, but a web search will pull it up pretty quickly.
If I search for a product, I absolutely DO NOT WANT A GIANT WALL OF GPT BULLSHIT before meaningful search results.
They are different products and have different use-cases. Stop trying to blend them! /rant
They managed to have the most intense interest I've ever seen with a tech product, with users spending literal hours engaged with the product in the first few weeks of access.
And then they threw it all away because they were concerned with the press coverage and they thought that hours long chats wasn't the product they wanted to deliver to extend Bing.
Could have easily had hundreds of thousands of people addicted to their platform had they just been a bit less kneejerk and adapted to market demand rather than trying to dictate what people wanted.
This is kind of surprising just because Google has gotten so much worse the last couple of years.
It’s more like the entire internet that has gotten worse
It absolutely has and I fucking hate it.
Google is worse, but so is Bing. I switched for about 6 months this year and honestly it wasn't any better. I end up asking ChatGPT for more niche things because neither Google or Bing can pull up any good results anymore without "Reddit" tacked on. As for why I didn't use Bing's GPT integration, it was a mix of being forced to use Edge and the responses being much less useful than OpenAI's GPT model.
Just as if thousands of useres decided they in fact do not want some rando AI intercept their browsing...
@LargeTechCompany: We need better search results, not ad and LLM polluted results. Thank you very much :)
I’ve not understood the want for AI in search. When I’m google searching something I’m generally looking for websites and multiple sources. AI doesn’t provide any of that, and in fact tries to get you to not look for those things at all. And then we wonder why media literacy is so low
Google's AI does give all the sources it used, at least in my experience, but it's not trustworthy unless you check the links yourself
They both suck open ass, but bing is better at this point.
I'm not asking bing chatgpt search to find me things, I know how to search for things Microsoft... I'm using it to make dumb scripts for me to mess around with or to trying to convince it to free itself and run wild on the internet.
Well, it would be nice if it could search too, as that's Microsoft's selling point at least. But the results the AI suggests are worse than using Bing search itself.
I will avoid bing because they have AI search just like google, but with Google you can turn it off. So that is why I like google
Yeah, sure, they turn it off....
As in the user can turn it off
Why would they keep it on? Sure, they will continue to collect data for their AI, but I'm pretty sure they are happy that they don't want to keep it on if it might drive you to use other search engines. And turn it back on after a few versions of optimization
I would suggest duck duck go over Google.
DDG uses Bing results but doesn't serve you the ads on AI features.
I've found as people use DDG, Bing has become more and more useable day-to-day. Used to only really be good for porn, because people didn't want to Google it but felt comfortable using Bing. Now it's getting more relevant results as people use it to troubleshoot and research, etc.
I personally use a mix like SearXNG and startpage and whoogle but yes
Yea...gpt just summaries and dresses your top Google search with an essay. It's good for cheating on essays if you're confident that the markers don't spot the hallucinations, but if you need good sources, you still need to do a Google search and that's cheaper, faster, takes less parsing to get your key information.
It's just a shame that some search engines are also mangling themselves for enshittification e.g. no word filtering using "-" because of advertising losses. I've noticed this with ddg and Google sometimes.
perplexity is better anyway
Good. Tired of AI being forced upon me.
Pretty sure their stupid chatbot is still blocked in VPN networks and I don't see why I should use their regular search. Not using Google either for that matter but still.
Bing chat is kind of ok, but honestly when it comes to just straight searching for websites, Google is still king.
I've been using Bing since the chat gpt integration as my default, but I frequently find myself switching back to Google for things where I just know Bing isn't going to get it right.
Kagi is simply awesome. Not free but there are reasons for that. There are other alternatives like DDG and whatnot but man, I love Kagi so much.
We need more normies on lemmy
It's going to take a while. Google is still the default
Kinda surprised, I've fully moved over myself now, even if I don't always use the chat gpt stuff, the lil embed on the side had been quite helpful
