queermunist she/her

/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!

  • 46 Posts
  • 12.1K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle
















  • I can’t tell if you’ve forgotten how good search was, are too young to know better, or were never good at using search.

    I’m telling you that you didn’t have to “dig through the answers” if you formatted the search well. It worked. You obviously couldn’t trust everything you read on the internet, but the tricky part was formatting. No digging was required once you were good enough at key words, syntax, and search functions (“” , + - site:). Search results were incredibly efficient and effective. It was amazing.

    AI is now maybe as efficient and effective as search results used to be. That’s it. They ruined search and gave us AI.

    And they’ll ruin AI too, just you watch.


  • It used to be that the first couple results would answer the specific question, as long as you knew how to format the question in the correct search terms and with the correct special operations. What might take longer is refining the search to get extremely specific results, but that was usually only necessary if you’re writing a paper or something.

    But you shouldn’t just trust whatever the AI says when you’re writing a paper anyway, so that’s not really different.

    AI does allow you to skip all that and just ask a plain language question, but search didn’t used to take so long if you knew how to use it. It worked.


  • If you ask certain AI a question, it will give you a faster and better answer than using a search engine would, and will provide sources for further reading if requested.

    I think that speaks to how bad search engines have gotten, not really to how good AI is. Google used to work. I promise! It used to not just be ads and SEO garbage, if you knew your special search operation functions you could find exactly what you were looking for every time. It’s only because they enshitified the platform that AI search even makes sense to use.

    They’ll enshitify AI search soon enough and we’ll be right back where we started.