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Comment by joker_minmax | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed it's harder to find recipes from smaller sites anymore.

Try looking up medical queries, especially for anything more complex than a regular flu.

The first page is just the same few domains. Meanwhile, websites dedicated to the disease and often maintained by supportive communities languish at the bottom of the pile.

Why? Because Google decided that “authority” of domains is important, not the content. So a generic article on WebMD will rank higher than a forum page filled with mountains of information from actual patients and medical professionals.

I have been using openAI for this, its surprisingly accurate, and way faster for easy recipes and instructions.

I'd rather support those small time blogs, people who do it as a hobby and for the creative joy of it, especially for recipes you don't see a lot in the English-speaking world. Using a language model for a recipe feels soulless to me.

Not to mention the llm basically copies these recipes word for word without attribution.

We won a set of fancy cast iron pans and gpt explained to us what each of them are for. Way better experience than googling or reading wikipedia.

What made the experience better to you? I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me.

> I would feel compelled to Google search everything after the fact to make sure it wasn't lying to me

https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...

>I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard.

Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.

Google didn't write the recipe, though; the blogger/author did. I have never trusted the snippets that Google started taking out of context and attempts to spoon-feed you at the top of the search, because much of the time they don't answer what I asked. Even then, the source is cited, allowing you to see the context yourself. Google is a tool for locating information from other sources. LLMs do not always correctly cite their sources, let alone provide them.

For me at least, I sometimes find it very difficult to google information I don’t yet know a lot about. It is very difficult if you don’t know the jargon to find anything that goes beyond the very surface level. Or if you did find the correct word, it goes too fast and you are not able to follow. It can be difficult to find an article in the “goldilocks zone” where I can follow along but also learn a lot. I do not do this, but I can imagine that AI could help with that as a starting of point. Then I would probably still google to confirm.

yeah I went back to google to verify the information - like the other commenter said, I didn't know where to start, so gpt was very helpful.

It's shocking how gpt has almost no utility though because you can't actually TRUST anything it says. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

YouTube is a great place to find recipes from individuals. They usually have the entire recipe in the description. And a video to go along with it!

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