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

  • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
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    5 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.world
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      5 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.social
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        5 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.world
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          5 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.social
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            5 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.

    • cordlesslamp@lemmy.today
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      5 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.