I switched away from Google years ago. First was using DuckDuckGo, but over the last 2 years I used Ecosia more. The devs and their purpose of Ecosia seemed more friendly, and both is Bing in the back end anyway.
I still use Google when I’m wanting to find a particular website, but ChatGPT is definitely nibbling at the use cases. ChatGPT is good when I’m brainstorming random ideas - it’s important to bear in mind that it makes crap up, but sometimes that’s what I’m after. If accuracy is important I can double-check it afterward.
Bing was looking like it might take over from Google for me, but in recent weeks something changed and I started not liking it any more. I would ask it for something and it would always do a websearch and seemingly base its answer entirely on whatever website it first found. That results in it giving a lot of “I don’t know the answer…” responses when I know that the answers are really out there. If Bing’s going to act as the “I feel lucky” button on Google then there’s not much value in it. Maybe they’ll fix it.
But it’s really good in faking knowledge. Very often it sounds legit, even though it’s just some made up bs. You read it, it’s wrong, but it still sounds like it’s legit. Read about a judge or lawyer using it to provide old cases as precedent and CGPT made up some old case and case numbers. Still it was used in court till it turned out such cases never existed.
I only use duckduckgo and startpage anyways.
Anyone else using Kagi.com for search? I’m using it as a paid user and it’s fantastic, no ads and no tracking and results are great. I use ChatGPT for “ideas” and Kagi for specifics.
How come you feel the need to pay for your search engine? What type of searches do you do?
For me it comes down to 3 things:
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I like the idea, that if kagi makes decisions that are unpopular with the majority of users, they will lose income as a direct consequence of that. So their business decisisons are driven by their users interests and needs, not by what advertisers want (in googles example)
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I like the basic idea of what the kagi team wants to achieve and I want to see the end result of that. But in order to be able to compete in a market dominated by tech giants like google and Microsoft I’m willing to contribute financially.
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I like my web browsing experience ad free. I know (and use) ad blockers, but I also recognise that, for any service, money has to come from somewhere. And if that service provides me with actual benefits, and I’m happy with it overall, I’m fine with paying a fee instead of seeing ads.
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Yes, me too. I’ve been looking for google alternatives for a while, because of privacy reasons, but also because the quality of the search results has gone down on google for the last few years, in my opinion. For troubleshooting searches I feel like google always sends me to useles “have you tried sfc /scannow” forum posts, instead of recources that would actually help find the root cause.
I found that DDG helped with the privacy issue, but the results were even worse. So I’ve used startpage.com for a while, and then stumbled across kagi.com, which I really like so far.
I’ve tried Bing GPT a few times, purely because I’m interested in the technology. But usually when I have questions that I couldn’t solve through kagi/google myself, BingGPT was completely useless, either not understanding the question or giving complete hallucinations as answers, that were not even present int the sources it cited.
