Google, and other search engines, deliberately ruined their search results to increase engagement, and probably to drive up usage of AI.

I must be a boomer or just be playing different games to everyone else because duckduckgo (with AI disabled) still works just fine for video game questions. Once in a blue moon I ask an LLM a programming question that requires context/grammar/not just keywords into a search engine (and verify the LLM's answer ofc) but video games seem pretty suited to keyword searches. Name of the quest, name of the in-game location, name of the NPC, level number, etc, should get you exactly what you need.

i feel this. i spent 30+ years being very proficient in keyword searching, and making fun of those elderly folks entering whole, natural language questions into their search...

.. and here we are

Literally every time I've tried to rely on AI results they've been wrong. Either small details or something huge but it's always something.

And it makes me feel bad in turn that I’m part of the problem polluting the earth with this crap

i wouldn't beat yourself up about it, a 3-4 hour gaming session uses far more power than a couple of prompts asking the robot how to play the game

shoot your computer

optimizing for advertising ruined search. to the extent that an llm can direct you to more information about something you're not sure how to describe perfectly, clock is ticking.

everyone switch to deepsek! don't let sam altman count you as a chatgpt user.

deepseek has been shown to be more energy efficient and just more efficient overall.

I used AI one whole time when I couldn't figure out where a setting was in a program, and it just got it wrong and I spent another half-hour (it probably wasn't actually that long) trying to find it myself, but even more angry because I had interacted with AI.

I still cannot find the use-value for this shit. The closest I've gotten is making use of AI captioning, which is still flawed but a better alternative than no captions at all. That said, it wouldn't be as useful if somebody had been born deaf or something like that, because they wouldn't know what similar-sounding words or phrases the AI got wrong and be able to fix it with context clues.

I ain't using "AI" for anything, none of you can make me, that shit sucks

don't worry, soon they'll enshittify that, and then you won't have anything to use

honestly, google is shit. even google's LLM is garbage. they missed the LLM rush and are playing catch-up. their product is horrible

i switched to duckduckgo about a year or so ago and so happy i did.

but yah, i use LLMs a lot of the time. other than video game tips / resources, they're generally the new search engines for better for worse. i try not to use chatgpt and will use deepseek or Mistral AI instead and lie to myself that i'm a better person for doing so.

I've been using deepseek via opencode and avante for programming help because it's faster and more polite than irc and my skin has softened as a result.

I admit I have started using chatgpt instead of google scholar. Google has become absolute garbage. I recently switched to a self-hosted meta search engine called SearXNG, and it has been better.

The last time I looked something up, the AI gave me an answer, and then, the first link below gave the exact same answer, but with the terms reversed. I've never had AI not being wrong about some detail. It's too unreliable for me. I don't see the point if I've gotta do additional research to doublecheck anyway. Doesn't safe me any time

Beating yourself with a moral stick like a Victorian-era Christian

LLMs are useful for very specific things. The issue with them is that tech companies want them to do everything and push them in everything.

Instead of focusing on the areas where they actually are useful, and refining them to be more power efficient and less prone to hallucinations tech companies were like lets just see if we can redirect all human energy to the glorified word calculator and see if it becomes sentient. (Hint: It wont.)

I feel worse that after about an hour of futzing around with deepseek, I had it generate like 20 different combat scenarios for a LANCER game, found it repeated a few, then went over the official game rules to find they did it in 6. I cant tell which is worse, when AI is put into searches or when i use it directly.

If the first couple of links don't help me I will use the duckduckgo AI to answer my question. Sorry everyone

Switch to Qwant.

I am not a fan of AI either, but damn it all if the the search engine AI summery doesn't answer 90% of my questions. It saves me clicks and will actually load faster than the web page I'm going to click on.