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

submitted 6 months ago by RGB@group.lt to c/technology@lemmy.world

193 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.

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[–] cordlesslamp 52 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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".

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago

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

[–] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 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.

[–] cordlesslamp 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.

[–] Prox@lemmy.world 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.

[–] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 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.

[–] Prox@lemmy.world 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.

[–] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 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.