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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

Come on .. do you really feel that google is the place to go to find things these days?

Do you honestly feel that this statement is incorrect?

Personally, I agree. Google is no longer _the_ primary method I use to find things.

Google is still the primary method I use to find things, and I'm someone who has also thoroughly integrated ChatGPT into my workflow for answers.

I use Google when searching for current news or local restaurants or businesses. I use it as a sort of bookmark manager when I can't remember a domain or specific webpage I'm looking for. I use it when I really need to trust the source of information and know it isn't a hallucination. I even still use it sometimes for coding questions when I just need to remember a function name or something very short and I can get it with a simple Google search of 2 or 3 words. ChatGPT would give me the answer, but it would require a longer prompt or give me a wordier answer.

I had to move over to Kagi as I found it hopeless, so you're individual datapoint isn't enough to disprove anything. Neither is mine, so we need better data to make this call.

I personally use Google but I was using it to mean search engines in general, because I took the top comment to mean search engines compared to generative AI.

I see, I use Google to for some of the stuff you mentioned.

I pay for kagi and still use google pretty often. They are different tools, google is just one !g away.

> do you really feel that google is the place to go to find things these days?

Uhh yeah? Search isn't a trivial thing to implement and they still have the best product

Maybe the results are less relevant now because of AI spam, but they'll figure this out eventually. I'd say a good compromise is just using ublock origin to filter AI spam sites out of results

They have no reason to figure it out, they are a search monopoly and ads is their business.

They are stuck like Kodak, if we don’t break them up, we have a bleak future.

Why are they a monopoly in this sector? What's stopping people from just switching to Bing if their product goes to shit? Doing that literally takes like two seconds

because bing is even a bigger joke, where ai spam is even built into the product

Bing search and Bing AI thingy are different products

I love your enthusiasm for how easy it is to change human behavior.

The cost of starting a competitive search engine is incredibly high, and unlikely to get real funding as a) the business model would likely have to be subscription based to align users interests long term with the companies interests, this alone is probably enough to make it a pass for most VCs, b) the incumbents in this space have an immoral amount of cash to spend on either acquiring, bankrupting or destroying any meaningful competition.

Joining the nuance parade - Google expanded their entry points to Search years ago via Maps and the URL bar.

Do I use Google traditional Google Search (google.com) to find things? Rarely. Do I use Google Maps to find bars / restaurants / order food? All the time.

I guess the nuance is what we're trying to find. LLM's swallowed the listicle - I don't need google.com to find an autogenerated list of "best restaurants in London". But if I'm in London at at lunch, and I need a coffee nearby, it's still useful.

Yup, Google is embarrassingly bad. These days I just use it as stack overflow and reddit indexer

This is surprisingly accurate for 90% of my dear searches

Have you tried alternatives like duck duck go? I feel like several times a week I have to go back to google because DDG is too dense to understand context, and will suggest things that just make no sense. Don’t even get me started on trying to search for NSFW content on it either.

Google is still the best free search engine.

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