With the rise of OpenAI GPT, web search like Google now seems outdated, obsolete. However, it’s still relevant. Good luck getting any up-to-date relevant suggestions out of AI. It’s great at completing a thought. It’s not great at actually giving a meaningful opinion or up-to-date fact. Even worse for current events, news, politics, things to do, places to go, etc.
Website indexing engines
- Google.com - Is the current leader, standard, still the best. Even despite AI. Why? 1. Sheer scale of their index. Search for a phrase, and see which websites display it. 2. Advanced search options. You probably know to wrap a phrase in quotes to search all of its words in that order. But did you know - * Wrap a single word in quotes to tell Google to only return websites with that exact spelling, not a synonym or derivative. Otherwise, it may ignore that word if the website matches the other words in the search phrase. * Use a prefix like “site:docs.react.dev” to search only the specified site or set of sites. Or “file:” to include only specific files like “.svg” or “.pdf”. * Prepend “-” to exclude words or phrases. Sometimes you’re searching for a term that most often means something else. So, remove the distracting meaning from your results. Search It’s only good if you use it correctly. Click here for more tips like these - dramatically improve Google’s results. Get fewer ads and more relevant suggestions.
- You.com - This has potential to revolutionize search and dethrone Google! Specify which categories of sites/apps you want to search. Instead of getting results from the entire internet (with mostly distractions), see only results from sites that specialize in what you’re looking for. It takes some customization. Currently for power users. But they’re actively working on making this the next mainstream search option for everyone. They just lauched a chat bot like ChatGPT that will answer your questions, but unlike ChatGPT (which does not know anything from the past year, and prefers to give more generalized answers), this one gives specific answers with real-world data and latest current information. Spoiler alert: Google is still better.
- Bing.com - It’s accessible to programmers via API - use it to program your own site or app. It’s not as good as Google because it does not support advanced queries, but when you don’t need anything more advanced than a couple keywords, the results are pretty good. This has great potential to move up to the #1 spot with their upcoming implementation of OpenAI GPT, and their innovative and intuitive practice of annotating each idea in the AI-generated answer - link to real web pages. Microsoft knows that even GPT v4 can’t be trusted to be 100% accurate. Also, people may want more info from the source, from the author. So, this looks like a truly revolutionary improvement. Finally!
- Perplexity.ai - Powered by OpenAI + Bing results. Not ready yet, but something to watch.
- MillionShort.com - New. Nobody knows about this. But it has great results, and more importantly - great filters! Example search: https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=2023 ai news&shopping=y&chat=y&remove=1000000&country=&dt= See the filters on the side. Ignore all ecommerce sites, or search only ecommerce sites. Amazing! Block sites that are spammy or not useful. Very intuitive. Not in the top 3 only because it’s still not finished, often doesn’t work. When it does it can be glitchy. I do hope they figure it out!
- Amazon.com - It has the fastest cheapest shipping, but its search results are frustrating. That’s because half the results are ads or promoted content. Again, use an ad block browser extension. Read more.
- Medicine and health - There’s PubMed.com for scientific studies and research. Read more.
- ChatGPT - You’ve probably seen YouTube videos and Twitter posts asking if this will replace Google. That’s not just clickbait. If you don’t need current results from the last year, then ChatGPT can tell you just about anything. Don’t be afraid to ask detailed specific things. Ask for specific links to websites, apps, data endpoints. It already read the entire internet for you!
Communities
Knowledge from books
books.google.com/talktobooks - This AI read thousands of books. Ask it a question. It will tell you what it learned from the books. No longer necessary to spend time reading books yourself. Haha.