Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/10/openai-said-to-be-launching-search-engine-on-monday-directly-targeting-googles.html
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A “search engine” that’s at least 30% errors and incorrect info:
Yes, Google sucks now.
“AI” will not be better.
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But this is better
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Better “hallucination?”
Not providing the most obvious result, plum, is rather concerning.
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Wow, can’t wait to have my search results filtered through an algorithm trained on a steady diet racism and misogyny. 
Enshitification marches inexorably on.
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Are there any search engines these days that aren’t enshittified by AI? Google is becoming effective useless for anything but the most popular searches, Bing is cribbing Google’s notes, and most of the rest seem to just be front-ends for, mostly, Bing. I used to be able to find results for really obscure stuff (mostly error messages for uncommon software packages I have to use at work) but now the algorithms decide that this other thing that bears but passing similarity is what I REALLY wanted to search for. It’s infuriating. I highly doubt OpenAI will do any better.
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Oh Cool! So mow I get to choose between ad-laden garbage peppered with actual results, and conspiratorial hallucination. /s
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So . . . the search space is now open to a non-AI, non-advertising focused search engine. If this wasn’t the worst of all possible time lines, someone would step up an fill in this gap, “Classic Search” or something similar. Dump in keywords and filters, get the results, possibly a text-based ad somewhere beneath, done. Sure, it is a niche audience, but so long as you have the right answers, that must count for something these days.
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Well there’s Kagi, but it’s a paid service. I tried it for a month. It seemed marginally better than Google, but not Earth shattering. Duck duck Go also exists. I didn’t like the results, but YMMV.
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Yeah, seriously, wtaf? Adding AI has ruined search - building search on AI is obviously a disaster-in-waiting. Why would anyone even consider it, given we’ve seen how it badly it works.
All “hallucination,” all the time. (I keep saying, with “AI” output, it’s all “hallucination,” it’s just that some of it happens to correspond with reality.) Broken by design.
I keep thinking that, but I can’t even imagine how high the barrier to entry is at this point. (Not to mention you’re competing with the company whose name is literally synonymous with “search on the web.” It doesn’t matter how shit Google gets, as long as people perceive them as the only choice.)
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AI Query > Name one vegetable: Plum
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Agreed that that would be preferable to what Google Search has become, but I’m worried that no search engine will ever again be as good as what we used to have because so much of the content out on the internet is now AI generated garbage, and even a great search engine will always be limited in how good the results can be if those results are pulled out of a giant and ever-growing heap of garbage.
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Fabulous.
So we’ll have AI regurgitating results generated by other instances of AI.
Welcome to this week’s edition of “Post-Human Centipede”
God no.
Another semester where I have to sit down with the kids and try to bring them with me to the perspective that they are being absolutely fucked over by the new shiny thing.
I love my job, but it’s the people, not the technology. I fucking hate that and “I am a technical boy”.
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So it turns out the unrealistic part of The Lorax was that the stuff they completely destroyed the environment for was at least a useful product that people actually wanted. 
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I gotta say, the more that tech companies push out these technologies the more hip I’ve been getting to the idea of a Butlerian Jihad.
“We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a “dump program.” We dump the things which destroy us as humans!”
―Minister-companion of the Jihad [src]
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… we all probably remember Microsoft being “the bad guys” in the computer business in the 1990s —especially since they formalized their monopolistic intent into an actual policy — and Google being the scrappy start-up
Today, apparently, Microsoft is a $200 billion company in terms of annual gross revenue, and Google “Alphabet” is at $300 billion
If we’re all supposed to condemn “big business” and sympathize with “small business,” maybe I should give Bing a chance already 
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Towards the end of last year, I switched my systems at home over to DuckDuckGo and haven’t regretted it. 
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