Search engines don't make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.
The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.
My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.
Yeah, but it's changing. Search Engines today don't just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it's becoming a lot more developed.
With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it's not just showing you a list of sources, but it's answering you directly, making claims, stating "facts" etc. You can easily forget it's just a search engine, can't fault people for this.
I got super tired of google a few months ago. "Ah, you searched for these terms. But I am going to ignore that and instead show you results for these diffetent ones, because fu."
So I started using bing instead, I wouldn't say it is worse. Just differently bad. Some search things are much worse, some are much better.
Quite annoying how they keep pushing for "AI" all the time though, so might go back to google soon anyway.
Huh. I had no idea! And I use DDG... But I feel like all search engines are shit these days. 50% of the hits are autogenerated translations with AI creating false .[country] domain (I'm in Denmark) which are just advertisements. I miss the old days of search engines. Fuck, even Alta Vista gave more right answers back in the Netscape days!
I will admit that I used it for years for the rewards, and it worked well for me. Once I started using a VPN though, it decided I could only redeem my rewards in Canada (I live in the US). I could have probably fixed it, but it caused me to have one of those "what am I doing anyway" moments and switch to using a SearXNG instance instead.
This feels just like that situation when gøøgl€ was saying there are no countries beginning with "K" before listening Kenya, except on a continental scale.
I mean have you heard an Australian accent? It's like "this is totally a legit accent, we're speaking English, mate, jabbamawong!" half of it isn't even words they just make it up as they go like they're not being sarcastic.
Who caaaaaares, why is this news 😭? It's been said over and over that these networks aren't reliable and can make mistakes, so what, it will be fixed in a month or so? Is not like these systems are deployed in critical situations or anything