This is one topic I’m quite willing to go into conspiracy theory territory on, because Google have a lot of very clever engineers and must surely know that their search is dogshit.
The only plausible explanation is that they’re somehow making more money doing this than they did by being quietly competent.
They know it’s trash. But searching multiple times and weeding through dogshit, you spend more time on their site looking at ads, unless you use ublock, then it’s just annoying to the user.
I do not find LLMs much great right now. But there been a few instances where googling or searching would yield me no useful results but somehow ChatGPT had a suggestions for problems that I want to solve and it delivered me solutions that actually did work.
Also, there has been couple of times where I had no idea where to start when researching topics of my interests. When trying to post on reddit with a question, these usually come off sort of gate-keeping-like or tried to steer me into direction I didn’t want to go. ChatGPT, on the other hand, gave out options. And, since recently, (dunno, in 2021-2022 it wasn’t doing so) also gave sources too.
In any case, searching in google without adding “reddit” to a promt 99% of the time gives bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora? Never found a single useful post there.
bullshit options with shit ass quora usually at the top. Who dafuq uses quora?
I wonder the same thing. I used it once, and only once, in my life. I had been trying to find vegan birthday candles and having no luck finding sources for the wax (since I was explicitly avoiding beeswax), so I asked Quora where I could find vegan candles. The answer I got?
“Don’t eat birthday candles.”
Uhhh…
Apparently whatever fool worked there had no idea that “vegan” is a lifestyle, that goes beyond food. The question was closed and I had no way to appeal or add information. Fantastic.
You go to quora for the comedy. Like “how babby is formed” or “am I pregernant”
I searched how to reset an anker speaker yesterday, all the AI website bullshit at the top of the page was completely wrong. Had to actually find the manual online and look it up. Finally found the answer after 2 completely wrong AI solutions. I don’t use AI, I just went off the search results where it shows a brief answer at the top of the page. I despise AI bullshit.
I see your point. It’s just for me worked couple of times well.
Example: I have hardware Steam Link hooked up to my TV. It had this issue where screen would freeze but game/audio would continue on, but menu would work half a time if not in game. I tried to look up the issue and found no lead. Adding “reddit” didnt help either. Only vague discussions, and dead-end leads.
ChatGPT prompt gave me couple of options where the 2nd option was to disable hardware encoding which fixed my issue.
I went to google same issue right now and still google results on 1st page have nothing about hardware encoding which was an actual fix. 1st link is to reddit where people say hardware encoding didn’t help so I disregarded this fix. Others claim that downgrading gpu drivers solve this issue. It didn’t.
I’d rather google. But lately quality of results are incredibly low.
It’s intentional. Hiding what you’re looking for makes you search more pages and see more ads. Google results turning to dogshit.

