I’ve replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p
All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.
If you need nuance and background, wikipedia is NOT the place to get that. Maybe you can get some good links at the bottom of the page to real information, but that can be hit or miss also.
for any question worth asking
Do you really mean questions about things people might not know that yet have simple answers that don’t need pages of context, are not worth asking?
Okay so how much glue to keep the cheese on my pizza?
4 seems like a good amount.
I would say that even simple answers at least deserve a source or citation. This is my biggest complaint with AI search, you get an “answer” with no qualification. The citations listed in the AI summary often don’t contain the actual info being presented.
This question certainly wasn’t worth asking.
I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.
AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.
It’s absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It’s like we’re collectively pushing for a mass extinction.
I sure would hope that those AI overviews are cached. Querying an LLMs for every repeated search sounds very wasteful
If it didn’t do the AInsearch repeatedly they couldn’t use the billions of daily searches to artificially boost their AI engagement metrics and further inflate this bubble.
Let them waste money on generating an AI overview I’ll happily skip on my way to the wikipedia link.
Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears’ quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an “illegal handoff”, which I had never seen before.
I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like “Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!”
I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can’t do that.
AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.
It would have been a legal play IF the lineman had checked in with the referee as an “eligible” receiver before the play. But evidently he screwed up and report in. It’s not a common play in the NFL, but every team has such a play on hand.
So that’s kind of a “it needs context” question.
Yeah exactly. The AI was just wrong and said it’s legal as long as you hand it off behind the line of scrimmage. I actually still have the screenshot he sent. Notice the 2nd bullet point.
But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026… (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)
Fucking hell, lol
Lmao, I guess my internal ad filter is still working because I had to look at that twice to notice it and wondered if there was a new Halloween movie coming out this year or something. Agreed, fuck that shit.
Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.
That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.
LLMs fundamentally can’t learn. They will continue to fail the same thing over and over until they guess and check into a response that appears coherent and correct.
Wikipedia has an app. It’s half of why I Google stuff. Usually a good place for quick answers, and an ok place to start digging in.
I’m half amazed at how bad Google has gotten, but that’s probably just me remembering the early days of web searches.
May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.
They even have a direct URL for it if you don’t want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
That and TVTropes of course
The funniest part is I’ve gotten better answers from duckeuckgo and Bing’s AI back in the day because they both didn’t treat reddit as a reputable source of info lmao.
Dunno how the scene is now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its the same.
When the old new ways become the old ways and i cant keep up with the new new ways
You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.
Yep. I still have yet to see an actual use for AI. People are like “but summaries!” Summarize this: summaries are only useful if the information being summarized doesn’t matter, which to me means you could just skip the entire thing.
This isn’t a high school test, this is real life. Why are you trying to use SparkNotes?
As someone with ADHD, I disagree. Sometimes the information is important, and I don’t want to have to dig through a wall of text to find it. One thing that annoys me about normies when they write, is that they tend to blab on forever on things that don’t matter instead of getting straight to the point.
If people wouldn’t use so many unnecessary words, I wouldn’t need a god damn LLM to summarize their ramblings into something my brain can actually parse.
They are great to tell you the words you need to search for something; they are great for analyzing “vibes” out of texts; they are reasonably good to generate you a link to some site that answers a hard to find question, traditional search would be better if there were any one around that isn’t completely broken.
