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Comment by dingosity | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. Google Search is effectively borked. Decades of anti-seo modifications have made it unusable (for instance, when I search for a compiler error message it would be nice to get hits related to that error message instead of an episode guide for Young Sheldon.) But Bard isn't a replacement. When I ask it to list QUIC implementations it would be nice if it doesn't try to give me a phone number for an animal shelter.

So... what's the assertion here? That a broken Bard is somehow better than a broken Google Search? I don't understand why. Neither gives me acceptable results.

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I don't know what they are doing. Google search is so bad that people are appending site:reddit.com to every search just to find something that isn't SEO spam, and bard feels like it's from five years ago. Whatever they did to google search a couple years ago was sudden and quite noticeable, so I am not sure why they didn't revert immediately. I guess they thought since they had no real competition they didn't have to worry about it. As soon at it started ignoring my quotation marks in searches so it could continue to feed me pinterest garbage I jumped ship to a paid search engine. As far as bard goes I think it's dead in the water. Nobody wants to use the 4th best LLM on purpose.

It's pretty amazing. I forget what I was searching the other day, but it was a fairly straightforward general programming question. First page google results were blogspam and weird aggregate sites. I went to ddg, pasted the same question and got a serverfault top result that answered my question precisely.

I like ddg, but they recently stopped honoring quotation marks, and google started honoring them again.

Google search is still generally unusable, but when DDG goes into “too few hits” mode, I find myself using g! to good effect.

This is after using DDG for about a decade, and never once having g! produce better results than it.

Anyway, I’m confident that llm integrated search will make these problems 100x worse. Now, if it can’t find questionable blogspam, it’ll just start pathologically lying. Great.

Counter-anecdote - I was searching for an error message verbatim recently (can't remember if I used quotation marks or not). Google literally had zero results, but the first DDG result was the exact one I needed.

Given how fresh the DDG result was (< 48 hours, from memory), I did wonder if Google was slower in updating their index.

I've been using ddg for years but I still have to use !g almost daily when searching for a particular page on particular domains because ddg just seems not to want to index them properly.

>paid search engine Is it good? Please share the name.

Sorry, I just saw this. It's kagi and I love it.

I'm somewhat confused. I've seen a number of comments of late talking about how google search is awful, but I use it 100+ times a day without issue. I tried the search you above "list QUIC implementations" and the top results all seemed reasonable?

1. Github: xileteam/awesome-quic

2. QUIC Working Group (quicwg.org)

3. "Comparison of Different QUIC Implementations" (a paper in a scholarly journal)

4. Wikipedia: QUIC

5. QUIC, a multiplexed transport over UDP (chromium.org)

Note: I use adblock plus which blocks all sponsored search results, so maybe that helps?

No no. I'm talking about doing that search on Google. And many of us don't have the luxury of bypassing the Google front end.

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