Google's Days are Numbered

[ecommerceprofit]

I'm bitter towards Google but this is not a biased statement:

I truly use Bing co-pilot and/or ai.com for 90% of my questions now. I am now showing my wife the benefits. It's so easy. Write a long detailed question that takes say 20 seconds to think about and save perhaps 5 minutes of searching on Google. The results are absolutely amazing. Google often has AI in their results...I won't say why it's not working because I don't want to help them.

Don't get me wrong...the guy running openai seems to make the music line "new boss same as the old boss" correct. Also, I don't know why there is not yet advertising next to my result...I would not mind ads if done tastefully.

[ronin]

Like many people, I’ve been using Google for the last 20-odd years (though probably not before spring 2000) and noticed two particular sources of irritation in the last 2-3 years.

One is the plastering of search results with ads to an unprecedented degree. It may be two and a half decades ago, but I haven’t forgotten one of the factors which made Google so appealing at the point when AltaVista had lost much of its lustre.

The other is when, despite multiple attempts to run variations of a more detailed search phrase - even when I re-phrase that search phrase repeatedly, extensively - Google consistently returns the same set of results.

Due to these two frustrations, when I started a new position last August and, off the bat, I was given a Windows 10 laptop with Edge set as the default browser, which, in turn, defaulted to Bing for Search, I decided to carry on using Bing for a bit rather than reflexively reaching for Google.

I still use Bing on my work laptop, today. In my experience, 2024 Bing has been, all year long, at least the equal of 2024 Google.

I recently started using Meta Quest 3 as a spatial computer. While setting things up I decided that my default search wasn’t going to be Google on this device either. In this case I set my default search on Wolvic (fka Firefox Reality) to Perplexity.

For years I was sceptical that any search could ever be so good that it would replace Google. Now I use Google, Bing and Perplexity alongside each other. And this has happened partly because the competition has got better. But it’s also because Google has got so much worse.

[tangor]

Been using Bing since it became a thing. Results are more structured and "mature", free of latest fads or behind the scenes editorializing. That said, still do the occasional g to see what changes (usually for the worse) that have been emplaced. Also DuckDuckGo (Bing at heart) for the sheer brevity, which is refreshing.

There is no doubt that AI will significantly change how search works, but still don't trust it for answers due to oddities of bias, hallucinations, and other ills that result in grain-of-salt acceptance.

[ronin]

Timely.

[theregister.com...]

www.theregister.com Perplexity, not Google, is now the best search engine Seek and ye shall find

[universenet]

Perplexity, not Google, is now the best search engine
Seek and ye shall find

I can not pass "human captcha" so not working for me or maybe I am not human anymore

[gatormark]

@ronin

In my experience, Bing is virtually unusable. I have been trying to use it the past last couple weeks. But, Google always returns considerably better results.

Having said that, the concerns you have voiced about Google are absolutely true.

[cooler29]

@universenet "I can not pass "human captcha" so not working for me or maybe I am not human anymore"

Good one! :) :) :)

[Kendo]

I use Google to find who are the biggest spammers in my industry, while I use Bing to find what I am looking for.

[Dimitri]

Perplexity, not Google, is now the best search engine

Perplexity will not survive more than 5 years. The layout is less bad than other AI search engines, because they list "some" sources "above" the generated answer, but only a title (better than nothing), but the problem is the methods that Perplexity is employing to feed its DB / AI, and the reason they are facing lot of lawsuits (worse than OpenAI), including some terrible mistakes in their answers like their claim that F-16 were used in Ukraine quoting an article that was not mentioning this at all. Perplexity is not rich enough to survive these lawsuits over and over.

Perplexity is also not respecting the will of sites not to be used to train its AI, not respecting the robots.txt, and also, trying to access blocked sources through undisclosed IP address, Amazon, even opened an investigation to see if Perplexity was not breaking the TOS of AWS.

[ronin]

Fair points.

I don't think we should get too hung up on the faults of any single particular alternative to Google.

The main point is that, after a very, very long period when there haven't been, there are now alternatives to Google.

Now it's fully publicly accessible, ChatGPT Search will only grow in influence: [chatgpt.com...]

[gatormark]

@Dimitri

100. Say it again, but LOUDER.

[RedBar]

Perplexity, not Google, is now the best search engine

When Perplexity first launched I was pretty impressed by it however I am now finding a LOT of techical and factual errors for my widgets, the kind of errors that could easily see an entity ending-up being sued in Court.

Their AI isn't lying it's simply "sourcing" incorrect information and, insofar as my widgets are concerned, this incorrect information is emanating from USA sites which, mostly, haven't deliberately posted incorrect information, they have simply been badly informed.

They need to sort out this problem quickly otherwise they'll get a similar reputation to Wikipedia a few years go.