I get the same as the main post. Either way the point still stands. I had someone correct me with a misconception about something because he googled it and thats what it said in the answer box. It's getting increasingly difficult to rely on search results especially when google synthesizes them into questions and answers with little context
Yes. I have to keep reminding my parents that those little Google answer boxes aren't real search results and can't be trusted. They sometimes say the exact opposite of the page they're citing!
I had someone correct me with a misconception about something because he googled it and thats what it said in the answer box
Oh, honey. You must be new here. Googling something, taking the first answer that fits your needs, doing zero follow up, and posting it confidently is nothing new. That has been happening for the last few decades.
It's getting increasingly difficult to rely on search results especially when google synthesizes them into questions and answers with little context
In what way? Like always, I have had to do a little critical thinking to gain anything out of my google searches. But now, sometimes the answer is right there. In what world is that a bad thing?
But you might just say "hurry durr it give me answer, therefore correct". Again, yes, that has always been the case. People will use any tools available to them to support their point. If a new tool has less than a 100% success rate, I don't see that as a problem.
Take out "the letter" part and search as just: "countries in africa that start with k". For some reason it seems the search involving the words "the letter" got fixed but others did not. Confirmed I was able to get both results by doing that and as of this typing I still able to switch between the two results by just adding or removing those words
Oh, this is great... And because the ChatGPT transcript is highly ranked on Google, it's almost certainly going to be used for training ChatGPT. A feedback loop of shitty information. Praise ChatGPT!
Remember GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Due to years of SEO and content farming (which google profited from, so you get what you deserve assholes) most of the internet, by volume, is self-congratulatory, for profit, garbage, or, you know, reddit garbage. Hopefully someone points a large LLM at the library of congress or other large, well curated data source, but of course copyright will not allow, thanks mickey mouse. Wouldn't surprise me if the military is already on it, hopefully that leaks...
LLMs will eventually start feeding of search results from other LLMs and they'll just start regurgitating each others nonsense. If that isn't happening already.
Nobody is going to point an LLM at a good data source because that would mean spending money on actually useful stuff not fast cars and booze.
Relevantly to Lemmy’s existence in the first place, it suggests Reddit as a pretty pivotal training data source, which Reddit tries to cash in on while also killing 3rd party apps due to apathy
I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven't used google for ages, so I first had to search "google" in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.
But no - there it was, right at the top - "While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound."
And with that, I'll contentedly go back to not using google.
The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound."
Not going to lie, that's pretty disturbing. This search engine is used by millions (maybe billions?) and they're providing false information to all those people. That's scary.
Chatgpt creating incorrect feedback loops like this is one of my main concerns about AI being used so prevalently. This and original thoughts disappearing because every new content in the web is generated by AI and not by a human.
It kinda seems like that's a joke that got popular, and if you quote the joke it finds the joke but if you ask a similar question it gives the real answer
Did it go viral or something and that's why google is finding it?
You cannot detect AI generated content. Not with any real world accuracy and it will only get worse.
Also, because google relies on growth for everything from compensation structure to business model, they are in a bind - ads is not growing anymore, it’s done.
And while they managed to create an illusion of growth this earnings round by juicing subscription fees 20% and increasing ad load everywhere, it’s not a sustainable tactic. We are already seeing a tech sell off as people are getting less and less secure.
So they rely on AI narrative to keep investors invested Google needs AI to work or the investors will move it to a place that may offer higher returns than a squeezed out ads model.
Worse even they are being attacked by AI - on the quality front (junk content) and in the marketplace (openAI), they don’t have a choice but to take a pro AI stance.
I actually stopped using google search all together last night, I was searching for something and the result where just abysmal and mostly irrelevant, I searched on DuckDuckGo and found much better results. I was using both, Google used to be so good and now it's just a mess.
Double quotes also didn’t work to apply explicit phrase searches last time I tried, which is incredibly annoying. Last I heard they were looking into fixing this though
The bigggest beauty point of it is that you can click on adverts knowing that you're sending money to Duck instead of evilCorp.
Also why, even if you know you're going to have to go to Amazon for something, you should search for it in your less evil search engine of choice so that Amazon are forced to pay them for the referral. A small way to assuage the guilt, but a goodun.
My default has been Duck Duck Go for a few years now, originally on privacy and fuck-google grounds. I used to have to (reluctantly) stick !g in the search quite a lot when it couldn't find what I wanted. Hardly ever need to now.
This sounds like "Hmm, maybe calculators won't replace mathematicians." to me.
Not sure why it should replace them. They'll co-exist. Sometimes you can do the math in your brain and for other things you use calculators. Results of calculators can still be wrong it you don't use them properly.
Finding sources will always be relevant, and so will finding links to multiple sources (search results). Until we have some technological breakthrough that can fact check LLM models, it's not a replacement for objective information, and you have no idea where it's getting its information. Figuring out how to calculate objective truth with math is going to be a tough one.
What a blast from the past! AI gives me second hand embarrassment for the people that work and get paid on this/for this shit. It's the second (or third) coming of crypto and NFTs. Just junk software that fixes nothing and that wastes people's time.
Searched for 'office gym' on YouTube yesterday and it returned a bunch of videos of Jim from The Office. The enshittification is everywhere these days.
I've googled error codes for programs with hundreds of thousands of users and had 0 results.
Really Google? You're telling me out of all these people that use / develop this application, that no one, kot ever. Once, has ever written hay error code down anywhere you index?
It's all so fucking shitty it has to be intentional but I can't for the life of me figure out WHY. Showing more ads? Maybe htnyhetrs other options. People will just use them. Making everyone dumber? Saving bandwidth??
I don't boy the "so has just gotten that good" narrative. It'll leave out sites from 2010 when it would be useful to see them and include them when it isn't.
I tried and it is true here at least. Says Kenya is the closest but although it starts with a K sound, it's spelled with a K sound. lmao
The only time I tried ChatGPT for something that required a little bit of processing it failed miserably. I had a shower thought, "what is the most used noun on lyrics of this band I like?" I asked it and it gave me random words. I decided to investigate and ask it what are specific lyrics of some of the most popular songs and it kept telling me made up lyrics, when I could actually find them immediately on Google.
DDG is just bing and I think google too? I don't know what's happening but over the last 2 years or so every search engine has been getting worse and worse and worse. They're all borderline un fucking usable.
Except kagi. Which you have to pay for. Which I am totally fucking okay with given the state of everything else.
Thanks to this post, I changed my search engine in Vivaldi to DuckDuckGo, and Edge uses Bing already, and I changed Mull's engine to Ecosia. Phew! Now I feel better.
Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
ChatGPT isn't the problem here. Some website has something up saying that's what ChatGPT responds, but I tried it and it did not. Instead, it corrected me.
Google, on the other hand, is still saying the same thing quoting the same site.
Yep it's a post about somebody typing a dumb query into a search engine and getting dumb results. Search engines have always worked better when you use more specific and unique language that's relevant to what you're looking for, versus vague questions entered like some grandma asking a question on Facebook.
I tested this with my local google so not America, somewhere in Europe.
"While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound."
I'd say this is worth a wot.
Doubtful, I opened up a privacy tab and typed this and received it as the first, non-paraphrased result.
The paraphrased result was correct, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google is doing onesy, twosy patches when notable examples of it being completely full of AI bullshit arise.
I didn't think it would work, because surely they'd patched it by now, but:
While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.
When I googled "What countries in Africa start with a K", it gave the correct answer, but when I googled "Do any countries in Africa start with a K", it gave me the ChatGPT nonsense.
I’ve been using DDG for ages now and tested it against Google a handful of times over that course.
They were nearly identical in search returns. Bing, Yahoo, etc have all caught up to where search just isn’t a thing anymore. Not like how it used to be when Google first dropped and was light years ahead.
And not for nothing but Google has been caught exploiting their search results so not sure if I’d be looking to them as the shining beacon they once were.
Kagi also links to an alphabetical list as first result. However, they also have a "quick answer" button using an LLM.
Quick Answer
The country in Africa that starts with the letter K is Kenya. [1]
Kenya is located in East Africa and shares borders with Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. [2]
Alphabetical List of All African Countries - ThoughtCo
Countries beginning with K - Worldometer
We as a society are so stupid that our collective dumbness has crippled AI. Its development has ground to a halt because machines cannot process the base level of stupidity that we all live in every day.
They wanted to copy our brains by studying us, but they can't because the vast majority of people don't use their brains in any meaningful way.
Google is working perfectly fine for me. No AI or misleading answers. Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I'm fine with Google as-is.
Here's what my results look like when searching for an African country that starts with K.
Edit: after reading some more comments, I can confirm that I don't get any strange results from any different ways of asking the question. Maybe it's a geographic thing?
That's remind me when you search uselessbenchmark in google, it shows nothing related to userbenchmark but some post, if you search uselessbenchmark in DuckDuckGo and Bing it will show you userbenchmark in the first results.
Userbenchmark modify results to benefit intel CPUs, the first generation of AMD Ryzen CPU was fine in userbenchmark, but in the 3 gen of ryzen CPUs they start modifying the results to benefit intel CPUs. It reviews must have been taken for fun and not serious, they say that the i7 12700 is faster than the 5800x3d, which in some scenarios is not true, also you can't take just one result, the games are different and can be the FPS different from each other, also the ryzen x3d reviews are just copy and paste.
So if you search for something in Google, you Google(d) it
If I use DuckDuckGo... Is it duck it? If it's not it should be after all the years of autocorrect changing fuck it to duck it, I think society has earned this one.
Alas, it has the emergent mind answer ranked fairly high still, and when search result was set to my country it was actually ranked highest.
Also, if you use Quick Answer, you’ll get same wrong answer:
Quick Answer
There are no countries in Africa whose name starts fully with the letter "K". While Kenya is the closest match, its name does not start solely with "K" [1]. All of the African countries' names were reviewed across multiple sources and none began completely with the letter "K" [2][3][4].
The countries in Africa that start with the letter K are:
Kenya
Kazakhstan [1]
[1] List of countries in Africa in alphabetical order
Though I don't know if that's because Kagi has fixed it in the last half hour, or some other factor. Still not a great answer. At least Kagi doesn't show it by default, at least with my settings.
Cool thing about kagi though. I added emergent mind to my blocked domains list, and now the quick answer displays the proper answer. Still not ideal but better than no options at all to fix it
Not op but I love kagi. I've tried so many search engine alternatives and always found myself going back to Google (or using g! to get Google results)
Kagi is the first I've tried where the results are good enough (and get better as I tailor what domains I want to appear higher or lower) to not have to rely on Google. I am a pretty avid searcher though and found I need to be on the $10/month plan for it to work out to the cheapest while still searching like I normally do
Switched a year ago and never looked back. I was using ddg before that. Highly recommended. Being able to block and rank sites is great. You can also setup redirects and there’s a quick link to the Internet Archive for every link too.
I've never heard it before, but it sounds about standard for a deez nuts joke so I wouldn't be surprised if it was popular in some subreddit Bard was trained on.
Bing gives me the right answer: that list of countries.
What an amazing time we live in. Where Bing is better than Google. Though Bing does have AI, I think you have to scroll up (past the top) or directly search with it so far.
I searched "Countries in africa that start with the letter K" and got:
While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.
But if I search for "African countries that start with the letter K", I get:
Kenya. Kenya is a country located in East Africa. It shares borders with Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The country is home to dozens of national parks and reserves and diverse wildlife such as lions, elephants, and buffalo.
It seems to be very specific, but I think that makes it worse.
Edit: I tried the same two, but in Swedish and both yielded a list:
Just checked on Kagi. It doesn't provide quick answer to this query, but that weird EmergentMind website is #1 on results. This is prolly because Kagi is taking some of the results from Google index, but good thing is, I can just block this website using lenses.
Maybe it's because I have ad blockers on, and try to avoid AI like the plague, but my google searches are giving me actual results rather than what you're describing.
Then again, I know google gives different results based on the user.
It's not intelligence at all. It does not understand what you ask it or what it tells you. It can string words together in a plausible sounding order. It cannot think.
It's toot. With screenshots. And everyone surely knows by now that your search results are dependent on your search history. And, of course, LLM output is stochastic, not deterministic. It lies at random.
It's probably not due to that. The effect of search history tends to be overstated and blamed for any inconsistency. They're not making the search pageload wait on a live chatgpt call, the card is driven by contents of the linked website.
Differences usually are either intentional A/B Testing or artifacts of Google's global architecture. You hit Google twice you're talking to different servers potentially with different versions of software. Companies take advantage of that to see how user behavior compares between versions as a form of testing. Additionally, if you and someone in a different continent hit Google, you're not even using the same data center. Different databases/caches in those data centers will have different data at any one time but they'll eventually become consistent. That causes results to change both person to person and over time.
I literally just googled that exact search inquiry and it told me all about Kenya. What's the problem again, and why are all these comments pretending the so-called glitch is real?
I just did it. It told me there were no countries in Africa that start with K, except for Kenya, which starts with K. That obviously doesn't make any sense, and sounds suspiciously similar to a lot of chatGPT-generated content (the distinguishing factor being that it sounds confidently incorrect, and contradicts its own statements). Then it said some stuff about how fun it is to learn new things, 100% reeks of shitty AI-generated content. I can post a screenshot if you want proof.
I believe you. Maybe it depends on browser, whether you are logged in, things like that?
This is the first result at the top spelled out succinctly:
Kenya is located on the eastern coast of Africa and borders Somalia to the northeast, Tanzania to the north, Uganda to the west, South Sudan to the northwest, Ethiopia to the southwest, and Somalia again on the southern border
Next link was worldometer with Kenya pulled up first.
Is this what you saw?
Human:
Did you know that there is no country in Africa that starts with the letter "k"?
ChatGPT:
Yes, that's correct! While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.
That was in the third or fourth link down. Sort of makes sense if it is trending or whatever.
I don't know what you're talking about. No one's "pretending" here. I just OCR copy/pasted the exact same text and got the same (wrong) result, just like others here have...