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Comment by grey_earthling | Hacker News Reader

> A search engine’s job is to surface reliable information quickly.

I disagree with this. For me, a search engine's job is to find relevant web pages quickly.

> For me, a search engine's job is to find relevant web pages quickly.

I disagree even with this. Please, no "relevant" pages bullshit. Give me just pages that contain the search terms verbatim.

Heh, I read "relevant" as meaning "containing the terms I'm searching for". You comment made me realize that the definition has shifted over the years. I agree with you -- I think that Google, for instance, trying to read my mind for what I "really want" is the main reason that Google search sucks for me. I expect no better when any other search engine tries that.

I think what we are witnessing is what Marxists call reification - the shifting of the meaning from an abstract to a concrete. That is Google has successfully reified the term relevant such that it is easier for them to control and market around.

Another example of a pretty atrocious case of reification is when facebook reified the word friend to mean people you follow on their platform.

A way to “surface reliable information quickly” is to “find relevant web pages quickly”…so is extracting and summarizing info from the internet that matches the query using AI. You quoted the end, and said you instead wanted the means

I agree. I want to do the interpretation, and have the search engine just find me the relevant web pages.

If I need help interpreting something, I will use a separate service for that.

Google (and apparently DDG)'s position is that they're not building that. Google started building that, but only because it was the technology available to get closer to the desired goal.

I partially agree.

The only thing I've used google for in the last 2 weeks is to quickly search for a wikipedia page or imdb page for an actor and movie.

Everything else is in ChatGPT now. The information from ChatGPT, even tho sometimes wrong, is far FAR superior to google now.

But how do you know if it's true information?

ChatGPT has been shown time and time to mix up facts, censor information, and make shit up. It's not an "AI", it's a glorified autocomplete box. I struggle to see how it can replace a search engine.

Sure. Sometimes it’s wrong. But I spend less time finding an answer on ChatGPT than Google. For example I’m not a c++ developer but I’ve inherited some c++ code work to do. So I’m like wow this vector thing is only ever looking for this 1 value. It would be better to use a dictionary or hash map or something. So I ask ChatGPT and it recommended unordered_map, and I asked why the existing code snippet I gave it had a lock around it, and it explained the thread safety with read/write etc. So fixing that all up shaved off 700ms in processing time in my test scenario.

I can ask it what’s the difference between 2 lists. I asked it about concurrent_unordered_set and it told me that it only exists in VisualC++ but if I want it cross platform I can look at Boost or TBB.

None of this information is easy as a non C++ developer to find on Google.

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