Technology

60033 readers

2857 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

819

Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination (gizmodo.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

192 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 52 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Today I caught myself unconsciously went to Duckduckgo to make a search (even tho the browser start page is already google).

Thinking back, I've been using duckduckgo more than google, and often because I can't find what I'm looking for on Google but ads and autogenerated fake webpages.

History will prove it once again, there's no such thing as "too big to fail".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

There's no better time to switch your default search engine!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Have you just, I dunno, used Bing?

Gonna be an unpopular opinion, but for me Bing is more useful than DDG. Note that I didn't say, "better"... I know that increase in relevance of results for Bing stems from the fact that they roll all my historical info into what they serve up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I used Bing by default for several months just because that's what my work laptop's browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I'd find something useful on the first page of results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Interesting! Did your results have that copilot summary thing? I get most of my answers there without having to visit a handful of ad-laden sites myself, though it also cites its references in case I don't trust the summary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah sometimes it do be like that, especially if you're searching for some obscure things or localized events then DDG is still worse than GG.