Technology

when will people learn that search results change all the time and are different for different people

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!

The second-highest hit gives a clue as to why:

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.

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.

verified

Which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound

AI is truly magical

AI generated content is pure search result pollution.

What Google should be doing rather than pushing Bard is detecting AI nonsense and purging it from their search database.

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.

Hmm, maybe AI won't replace search engines.

Surprised your first ten results weren't ads

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.

Tbh the problem is not due to chat gpt but because Google doesn't rank search results by correctness but something that is related to popularity.

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.

I've been using DDG for a year and like the search results but what bothers me is that you can't exclude a word from your query with minus sign!

Constantly forgetting I changed all my default search engines to DuckDuckGo.

Went to Google to test this...what a trash website.

Pushed me to download the app.

Pops up a recommendation to download Chrome.

Has clutter on the default search search form.

Looks more like yahoo than the google of yore

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/98bd9cfc-454a-4018-9217-e35ea5af305b.png

Hmmmm.

I never got into DDG because Google was legitimately better. It seems that is no longer the case and I'm finding no reason to use it instead anymore.

I got the uber pedant.. "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."

@JoBo I just googled it and Kenya came up as the first hit in Search and in Bard.

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.

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 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.

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.

Google when did you get so crummy?

I could reproduce it exactly as described.

I saw it, it's marked as a "featured snippet", whatever that means....

Google has been shit for years, news at 6.

Google can't even fucking tell me sometimes, out of curiosity, what a skillet is. Know what it does? Brings up the band named Skillet, instead. The first handful of results you get, is the band before you ever get to the pan itself. I feel that Google should require a level of separation to not mix the two, but I guess that'd be too hard.

Google is just good at fetching results, but not accurate ones.

No need for using sensational/clickbait headlines like this.

Someone recommended Kagi here, and tho it isn't free, it's the only engine I've found so far that can legitimately consistently outperform google

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