Tried four separate search engines. Was looking for news articles or any other statements regarding trump’s activity and statemnts after 9/11. I distinctly remember him commenting about how he now had the “tallest building in Manhattan” or some such arrogant and callous lies rather quickly following the event.
But it seems pretty difficult to find ways to bracket dates on search engines, and even the ones that I could do so, the search results were partially “poisoned” by sites deliberately returning current information post-dated to the date range I was looking for. But all the results that would have been readily returned say a decade or more ago are gone. They don’t even show up.
Where did it all go?
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. - Orwell: 1984
Edit: not trying to be unthankful for the help, I know there are plenty of current articles referencing what he said 25 years ago, but I was looking for the actual article from a first-hand source in 2001-2 when he actually said it.
This kind of thing is just about my most frequent use-case in GPT. I find it generally very good for crafting complex searches, and it can go in steps, offering to search various types of archives as you direct it and redirect it.
The great thing is that you don’t have to fish around for just the right words, as with traditional search engines. Just explain in plain language, and away it goes.
EDIT: Rock on with the paranoid, anti-AI downvotes! 🙃
Does it not bother you, search engines make their ai agent at the top of the page, then remove applicable results, so you have to use that agent to get that information?
You can’t say they need the ai to find the results, because we saw search engines work better without them for 20 years.
I’ve only seen that with Google. If the result is useful, then I’ll consider it. If not, then I’ll scroll past to the search results.
Google’s pure convenience, though. It’s been compromised for years, but does have a huge database. If I’m not finding what I want, then I’ll try something else.
Problem?
All the search engines became shit at once. Also I was forced to use bing the other day, shich ddg also is a sort of instance of, and both also have the ai agent lording over the results they no longer offer you.
All the search engines are engaged in an illegal shittrust to maximize revenue, and they’ve all removed many many applicable results, from links to streaming and downloading, to news articles, to everything.
Pure convenience my foot, Google is a shit company actively becoming worse, and only a frog in a boiling pot of google’s shit doesn’t see how bad it’s gotten since 2021.
*ribbit!* *ribbit!*
You know there’s an extension you can add that blocks Gemini from search results, right?
However, if you’re truly that hand-wringingly concerned over this stuff, and don’t like DuckDuckGo (or whatever), there’s also a P2P search engine project, SearXNG: https://searx.space/
Thanks for the tip, I tried those other alternates and none worked well so far, the pay one is supposed to be good, maybe I will give that one another chance I do appreciate it.
But that’s neither here nor there. They removed results we wanted, to force us to use their AI. That’s the big problem here.
And google’s full of shit about removing gemini. I followed multiple recent articles about removing it from my phone and none of the instructions worked, not even the ones published by google.
Idk about google search specifically because I use startpage, a proxy server that runs google through it, based in the netherlands, started in the wake of the Snowden revelations, that keeps your browsing history anonymous. But you can also view pages anonymously from it, though not all sites work with that.
I was searching for who said a specific comment about a book that Churchill wrote. I remembered the comment correctly but not who said it and where. So I asked the AI to see if it can find it for me. It did, right away. I was satisfied. But then I started to doubt myself a bit, tried to find the source but I couldn’t. I asked the AI to make sure that it was suggesting the correct person, turns out, it wasn’t. It even apologized, said “sorry, I was mistaken, it wasn’t X who said it, it was actually Y!” and then I was again happy… For a second. I Asked it to make sure, perhaps find a source for it… It couldn’t. So I gave up on that, took out my copy of “Walking With Destiny” and flipped through the pages for like 4 hours and found the quote and who said it and where. The AI didn’t suggest the correct answer at any point.
So yeah… AI might be good at times, but sometimes it just makes shit up for you. I still use it to find stuff, if I cant find it myself, but I ask it to find the actual source and give that to me, instead of just trusting it.
Yes, good points. Hallucination is common. LLM’s have a bias towards hallucination and taking shortcuts. Part of why I always try to err on the side of simple queries, as well as ask for sources on anything that looks promising.
Also, different LLM’s and different flavors of LLM’s can fetch considerably different results. Google’s built-in Gemini is still hilariously bad at times. Personally I usually use GPT, partly because it lets me program it in ways that stay global between sessions. Very helpful for getting it to stay on point and sober with the facts.
It’s not unlike curating one’s FV or Reddit feed-- you have to put in the work over time setting it up to best answer your particular needs.