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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Google Search hasn't felt less relevant to me ever than it does now. And I first stopped using Yahoo and switched to them some 20+ years ago.

It'll find anything except what I'm trying to find. Quotes are useless. The content itself is often garbage. It works ok on common queries, but that's not when I need it to work - I need it to work the most when the query is hard. The long tail is the only thing that matters when a user is judging a search engine's quality.

The web itself has gotten worse over time, but that's also partly Google's doing. Google extracted all the value out of the open web and kept it for themselves. Meanwhile online publishers of all varieties are dying, despite being the ones producing much of the value. Google should have identified this as a strategic threat decades ago.

Now I just keep a tab open to ChatGPT all day and use it as a search engine without all the trouble of dealing with webpages.

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Downside of ChatGPT is that it makes stuff up, of course, even when you ask it for URLs.

A few days ago I was going to send a patch to Alpine Linux, and I remembered they had a document for how they want commit messages to be authored but couldn't remember the URL.

Google search results for "alpine linux commit message style doc" only returned garbage in the first ~50 results - pages from Alpine's wiki unrelated to commit message style, pages from other projects like the Linux kernel about their commit style, and batshit results like https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... (happens to contain the word "commit").

So I asked ChatGPT "What is the URL of Alpine Linux's style guide for commit messages?" and it confidently told me it's https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/C... , which does not exist. I replied "That is a 404" and it responded "I apologize for the inconvenience. Alpine Linux's style guide for commit messages may have been moved or updated since my last training data. To find the most current style guide for Alpine Linux's commit messages, you can visit their repository directly and look for the CONTRIBUTING.md file or [go read their documentation and figure it out yourself, paraphrased]". The first one is a lie - a file named CONTRIBUTING.md has never existed in the master branch of that repo, as git easily reveals. The second one is schizophrenic - it's telling me to read the same file I just told it doesn't exist. The third one is unhelpful.

I had to find it myself. (It's https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/C... )

And it doesn't cite sources, and when it does it makes stuff up. It's even worse than Google; at least with Google I know where the information is coming from.

I only use ChatGPT for things which don't really need a source, such a code snippets. Either a snippet works or it doesn't. For anything where I think an LLM might mess up without me realizing, I go for Perplexity, so I can then check the sources to confirm.

You can get the sweet spot with https://perplexity.ai/ for many cases. It does the searches, aggregated answer, and the actual supporting links.

It got back with "The URL for Alpine Linux's style guide for commit messages can be found in the README.md file of the aports repository on GitLab. The specific URL is: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/R..."

(+ extra links that include the one from the end of this document, which is what you're after)

It could do better by returning the actual link rather than a page where you can find it, but it's still better then Google. (Kagi pointed at the same readme at least)

So it made up BOTH those answers. There was never a CONTRIBUTING.md, and COMMITSTYLE.md was added in 2020.

https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/commit/0b7097...

Thanks for providing an example of the search query you had problems with. Interestingly, I haven't noticed the decay in Google search quality that many are complaining about. The first hit when I use your Google query is https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/blob/master/COMMITSTYL... which seems correct?

Not for me it isn't.

In fact now the first result for me is my very comment above, but the actual COMMITSTYLE.md is still not in the first 50 results. The only result from even the right domain in the first 50 results is https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/docs/user-handbook (at #12, and of course irrelevant).

Yeah it's really horrible. I can't imagine what ridiculous metrics they're using internally to justify the changes. Well I'm sure some of them are "optimize the algorithm for profits"... but surely the fact that people are giving up on Google entirely as a result shows up in the data also? Or maybe it's just that the arms race against SEO has been temporarily lost.

I can't remember the last time a google search gave a useful result, outside of appending "reddit" to the answer so that the result is (probably) written by a human instead of bs blogspam. And I'm sure that won't work for long either.

I'm loving perplexity over chatgpt am I crazy but I find it so fun to use for web search tasks/queries

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