This is called service journalism, my friends. First off, a Wall Street Journal test of five AI engines on everyday questions picked a surprise winner: Perplexity. So I tried it out. It's pretty good! On a scale of 1-to-10, none of the answers in my short tryout were less than about 7. All were up to date and included links. And it's free for the basic version. Try it out here if you're interested.
Second, do you hate all the cruft in Google searches? That is, the sponsored posts, the Twitter aggregation, the AI summaries, the sidebar definitions, and so forth? If so, you can get rid of them thanks to a new feature rolled out a couple of weeks ago. After you do a search, just click on More and then click Web. You'll get a plain, old-school list of links and nothing more.
If you keep the Google tab open, it will continue to provide Web versions of your searches. Alternatively, if you're up for a bit of techno-tinkering, there's something called the UDM-14 hack that will produce Web versions for all your searches.
Personally, I sometimes find the cruft useful, so I'll probably just manually click the Web link whenever I feel overwhelmed with junk.
You're welcome.
Hey Kevin, since this is an AI topic, how do you feel about OpenAI and News Corp (Murdoch family propaganda) partnering for the sake of journalism?
https://openai.com/index/news-corp-and-openai-sign-landmark-multi-year-global-partnership/
I asked Perplexity where I could buy the cheapest milk locally.
It answered Aldis at $3.03, but the Walmart website has it for $2.93.
I asked it why that was and it told me it didn't compare it to Walmart and that Aldis was $1.99.
The Aldis website has it for $3.25.
I asked Perplexiy:
"how long will it take to stain my ceilings"
Perplexity's answer:
"Based on the search results, staining ceilings can be a very time-consuming process compared to staining smaller projects like furniture or decks. A small project like staining furniture might only take a day or two, staining entire ceiling surfaces in a home could potentially take weeks or even months to complete properly. In summary, you can tell your wife the process is not nearly as easy or as quick as she thinks."
Exactly the answer I was looking for.
Per Wikipedia, there are almost 400,000 registered domains using the British territory Anguilla's .ai top-level domain. And this:
"In 2023, Anguilla’s government made about US$32 million from fees collected for registering .ai domains. That amounted to more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product for the territory."
“ In summary, you can tell your wife the process is not nearly as easy or as quick as she thinks."
And that, my friends, is the first instance I’ve seen that absolutely, 100.0%, without any doubt, is a computer passing the Turing test. …With flying colors!
I hate fronting the damn videos. Sure, they're driving traffic to YouTube, and sure quite a lot of people would rather set their feet on fire than read. Let them look under the "videos" tab where videos belong.
For me, I've been trying other search engines first and only using Google as a last resort. They long ago passed the point where their results weren't SEOed up with spam. If Google wants to use AI, they should point it at that problem. But as long as their searches produce irrelevancy and garbage, that's what their summaries will contain.
Right now, I'm rather liking Qwant. Mojeek also looks promising. In the end, I didn't care for DuckDuckGo.
I thought cruft was a typo until it appeared a second time. In case you are as unaware of obscure computer related terms as I am:
cruft
/krəft/
nounINFORMAL•COMPUTING
badly designed, unnecessarily complicated, or unwanted code or software.
"this removes all unnecessary cruft from Word documents saved as HTML"
Wikipedia (edited a bit):
Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software.
Around 1958, the term was used in the sense of "garbage" by students frequenting the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 1959 edition of the club's dictionary, it was defined as "that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage". Its author Peter Samson later explained that this was meant in the sense of "detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for 'crufty,' a word I didn't hear until some years later". Cruft can also refer to alumni who remain socially active at MIT.
The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University's Cruft Laboratory. Built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft, it housed the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II.
I like the confidence with which AIs deliver easily verifiable wrong answers.
Re: Google "cruft," use DuckDuckGo instead. Just as good, no ads, and they don't sell your data.
I can't see the recommended path on my Mac > M1 chip > Safari
I see the "More" option, but that only offers
news maps books flights finance
No "web" option
The cruft is useful when it is just a summary of the relevant Wikipedia page, and that is all you were looking for. Otherwise, not so much. The cost-benefit is strongly against keeping the cruft by default.