“Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI? A Closer Look at Bing’s Accuracy for News Querie”

Sometimes the references simply do not support the claim being made

@baldur I don’t like this one iota. What decent search alternatives are there at this point, not using Google or Bing? I’ve tried others and they were mediocre at best.

@pimoore DuckDuckGo

@pimoore I've been using DuckDuckGo for years and it's been very good.

@pimoore A lot of people are going to recommend DuckDuckGo, but they are using Bing's search engine under the hood, so whatever service deterioration that happens to Bing will eventually migrate to DDG. And, yeah, there kind of aren't any good options out there for search. It's a duopoly where the competing parties clearly have a tacit unofficiall agreement not to make improvements that threaten profitability.

@baldur @jasonmcfadden @Archimage That’s exactly the problem. I’ve been using DDG for years now, and it’s one of the big two engines. Based on the article, I suppose the workaround is to not use search for news-related content. That still doesn’t mean the AI produced results aren’t going to further permeate into these search engines, and make the situation worse.

From my past testing, Qwant’s results were subpar, as were Ecosia’s (the latter of which is also Bing I believe). I’ve heard good things about Mojeek, but also that it’s very specific in terms of its search strengths. Not sure what the long term answer is at this point.

@pimoore doesn’t Wolfram have a search engine?

@Archimage Duckduckgo is essentially Bing under the hood.

@pimoore WolframAlpha is a somewhat specialized search engine…

@Denny @baldur @pimoore I so wish Apple would go into the search engine space, and not use it for business, just accurate and safe search. It won’t happen though… I kind of miss the old AltaVista.

@Denny @pimoore @baldur @jasonmcfadden @Archimage I’ve been playing with Brave search, which doesn’t seem to have a business model beyond an ad-replacing attention token for the company’s browser, and Neeva, which has a sold pay-to-use model but is jumping on the AI bandwagon too. I’m still wading through all the privacy fine print, strengths/weaknesses, etc. and haven’t decided what I think about them. Anyone else try these? Search engines are apparently hard to do?

@pimoore been looking at the options for search engines and came across Brave Search which is currently in Beta. It’s a privacy oriented search engine with it’s own index. I have been using Brave browser and liking it.

@restlesslens @mbkriegh @pimoore @baldur @jasonmcfadden @Archimage I'd tried Brave a while back but didn't stick with it. The visual layout is nice, easy to read. Good to know it's based on their own index. Just a couple of searches and it seems to yield good results.

@baldur I’ve found Neeva to work well, and its AI function cites its references, too.

@Denny OMG excite.com still exists!!! A tangential aside. In the early days, when someone got overly excited, I had this habit of saying, why are you so excite.com? Reading your comment just brought those memories rushing back 😆

@pimoore @baldur @jasonmcfadden @Archimage - If you use Ecosia, you also help save the planet by planting trees. That is my primary search engine. I switched to it from DuckDuckGo because of their mission.

I'll probably use the new Bing some of the time because chatgpt is incredibly useful. I don't like Google search anymore. I don't like that so much of their revenue comes from advertising.

@pimoore I use Brave Search all the time. Good and steadily getting better in my experience. (But then my search needs are pretty run-of-the-mill.)

@llbbl This is a great idea. I wasn't aware of Ecosia - going to try it now. Thanks for the suggestion!

@baldur That’s right. I’d forgotten DDG uses Bing. Good point. Tough question but good conversation. Aside: I was about to try the DDG browser for Mac 🤔 Edit: Think I’ll look at Brave search.

@jasonmcfadden I've used the Brave browser and search and found it pretty nice.

@odd Altavista’s search results were not that great. There is a reason Google was able to come out of nowhere and take over the dominant position in no time.

@odd To search and find results with high degrees of accuracy, I had to compare Alta Vista to Excite to Hotbot to Dogpile. Google in alpha did all that for me decades ago.

@jeroensangers I might project my nostalgia onto this. Yes, Google used to be great, but that was them positioning themselves to be “omnipotent”.

@Clonmeldigital Yes, I guess they used to be great, but that’s a long time ago.