Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

  • cordlesslampEnglish
    52·
    7 months ago

    Today I caught myself unconsciously went to Duckduckgo to make a search (even tho the browser start page is already google).

    Thinking back, I’ve been using duckduckgo more than google, and often because I can’t find what I’m looking for on Google but ads and autogenerated fake webpages.

    History will prove it once again, there’s no such thing as “too big to fail”.

    • vonbaronhans@midwest.socialEnglish
      61·
      7 months ago

      DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

      Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

      • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Have you just, I dunno, used Bing?

        Gonna be an unpopular opinion, but for me Bing is more useful than DDG. Note that I didn’t say, “better”… I know that increase in relevance of results for Bing stems from the fact that they roll all my historical info into what they serve up.

        • vonbaronhans@midwest.socialEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

          I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

          • Prox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            Interesting! Did your results have that copilot summary thing? I get most of my answers there without having to visit a handful of ad-laden sites myself, though it also cites its references in case I don’t trust the summary.

            • vonbaronhans@midwest.socialEnglish
              1·
              7 months ago

              Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

      • cordlesslampEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Yeah sometimes it do be like that, especially if you’re searching for some obscure things or localized events then DDG is still worse than GG.