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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Phind continues to be my favorite AI-enhanced search engine. They do a really nice job giving answers to technical questions with links to references where I can verify the answer or learn more detail.

Some recent examples from my history:

what video formats does mastodon support? https://www.phind.com/search?cache=jpa8gv7lv54orvpu2c7j1b5j

compare xfs and ext4fs https://www.phind.com/search?cache=h9rmhe6ddav1bnb2odtchdb1

on an apple ][ how do you access the no slot clock? https://www.phind.com/search?cache=w4cc1saw6nsqxyige7g3wple

The answers aren't perfect. But they are a good gloss and then the links to web sources are terrific. ChatGPT and Claude aren't good at that. Bing CoPilot sort of is but I don't like it as much.

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In my tests, it does hallucinate answers, even with Phind 70B. For example, I asked for bluetooth earplugs that have easy battery replacements. It always kept giving me answers for earplugs with I know have their battery soldered into the casing. Tbf, perplexity also fails at this question.

‘Easy battery replacements’ is pretty subjective. This feels like one of those error that demonstrate how good the tech is, because it’s being used for very specific and subjective requests

It should be able to figure out what an average joe would understand from such questions. I think any human would interpret "easy battery replacement" as "you can just remove the old battery out and put the new one in". If a random person asked you such a question, would you assume he has the tools and the skill needed to solder new batteries and considers that easy?

this is why search sucks the average person(if they didn't really know what you meant would ask...what are you talking about?

However, glued-in is not subjective. Non-replaceable is not on the scale of easily-hardly replaceable.

Can you name some earbuds where we could disagree whether it is easy or not to replace the battery?

Guess not

I just asked your question in French and the right answer (the Fairphone Fairbuds) is in third position on the right: https://imgur.com/a/dmoaB5r

Google seems to be better at this, giving me the Fairbuds directly: https://imgur.com/a/7En4e9u

What's good about Phind is even if it gives a wrong answer, it gives you a link to a website where you can try to verify the answer.

FWIW my query for your question gives me a pretty good answer. The first list has three options, one of which is soldered (and the answer says so). It narrows it down to unsoldered ones when I ask.

https://www.phind.com/search?cache=kukryw72yutlp4u88nubmjuu

This answer is mostly good because it relies heavily on an iFixit article that it provides as the first reference. That's what I like about using Phind, it's as much a search engine as an oracle.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/35377/which-wireless-earbuds-are...

If you ask it questions about software that doesn't occupy wide swaths of stack overflow, it tends to hallucinate features of the language too. I asked for some details regarding policies in Chef and it went on a long, confident diatribe about the "policy" resource (which does not exist, nor does anything even kind of similar to it AFAIK).

Thank you! We think there's quite a bit of room for improvement still and are working on better answer organization and verifiability.

Phind was my go-to for getting more relevant and up-to-date information that could be found on the internet... but that stopped about 3+ months ago.

Many times the answers seemed to be getting more and more incomplete or incorrect as time went on (to a variety of questions over a period of months). Even worse it would say it couldn't find the answer, yet the answer was among the sites noted as reference!

I've ended up mostly resorting to Bing and gpt 4o. Frankly, I'm hesitant to waste time trying this new version.

I see references here but when I ask questions, I get answer but no citations, and I am logged in. This used to be an issue but was fixed but still an issue for me. If I logout and ask I get reference but the answers are using instant model.

I've noticed that sometimes too. I think it depends on the type of question, sometimes Phind decides you don't need references. You can ask explicitly for them.

Kagi does the opposite: it's mostly search results but sometimes an AI gives you a "Quick Answer" too.

I'm a Brave Search enjoyer for similar reasons. It's easy to switch between normal search and LLM-powered search when you prefer one over the other.

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