this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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I guess I'm a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia when I want to know stuff. I use chatGPT when I need quick information about something that's not necessarily super critical.
It's also much better at looking up stuff than Google. Which is amazing, because it's pretty bad. Google has become absolute garbage.
Or maybe it's just as bad but extremely confident, so you accept the wrong results. ChatGPT is just looking at Reddit and Google search results through an additional layer of language processing, it can't possibly be better than either. Every day AI bros tell us "no seriously now they fixed search!" and I do the exact same benchmark of 10 easy questions that you can first an answer to within the first five results of a traditional search, and they fail on 6 out of 10.
To get a decent result on Google, you have to wade through 2 pages of ads, 4 pages of sponsored content, and maybe the first good result is on page 10.
ChatGPT does a good job at filtering most of the bullshit.
I know enough to not just accept any shit from the internet at face value.
Block ads and use a different search engine?
You repeated that twice, but it's demonstrably false. It does not. It feeds you completely wrong information randomly.
If you're going to fact check ChatGPT anyway, you're wasting more time than just doing the research yourself with good tools. But this is a false equivalency, because by doing the research yourself you start to learn good sources and exercise information synthesis, by using ChatGPT and fact checking it you're helping Sam Altman get richer.
Why the fuck are you defending google so hard lmao.
Google will absolutely put bad information front and center too.
And by using Google you make Google richer. In fact you get served far more ads using Google products than chatGPT.
What's your fucking point lmao.
Ah yes, when I said "use a different search engine" as a solution to Google having issues I'm certainly defending Google! What an endorsement right? "Use a completely different service" is free publicity for Google!
Other search engines are even worse than Google lmao. Brave consistently provide literally the worst results. Duck duck go same.
Are you actually serious.
Very serious, doctors surgically removed my ability to be silly. But on a different note, if you think every search engine ever gives worse results than ChatGPT, I'm afraid the heavy LLM usage already rotted parts of your brain. I'm sorry for the bad news.
I rolled my eyes so hard I sprained my optical nerve.
Oh no, now you have multiple issues with your nervous system!
I think you missed a part of their comment:
Both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo have served me pretty well. Kagi also seems somewhat interesting.
Ecosia is working with Qwant on their own index, the first version of which has already gone online I believe. So they're no longer exclusively relying on Bing/Google for their back-end.
I have yet to use an alternate search engine for any length of time (and i've tried a few) and think "ah yes, this was the kind of results I expected from my search", they're systematically worse than google, which is an incredible achievement, considering how absolute garbage google is nowadays.
Brave, which i'm using now, is atrocious with that. The amount of irrelevant bullshit it throws at you before getting to the stuff you are actually looking for is actually incredible.
The CEO of brave, Brendan Eich, is opposed to same-sex marriage.
They, too, are working on their own index, but I cannot support that company and would suggest you seek alternatives.
And, though Ecosia/DDG don't always show what I want, it's very easy to add a
!gto my already existing query and get put through to google. Which is rare, mind you, but comes in handy every so often. Does that mean it sometimes takes a *bit* of effort to get the result I'm after? Yeah, but that is a sacrifice I'm happy to make when it comes to supporting alternatives.