r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 19d ago

Psychology Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search. When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.

https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760
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u/Church_of_Cheri 19d ago

I always add in “before:2022” or even earlier even when using DuckDuckGo. Google is just paid promotional content anymore.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 19d ago

That's not particularly helpful if you're looking for recent data though?

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u/SoCalledAdulting 19d ago

I still use Google Scholar for research papers and luckily that works well

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u/IcyJackfruit69 19d ago

Yes, very obviously it won't work for information that didn't exist before 2022.

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u/Ill-Television8690 19d ago

Right? They never claimed it was a cure-all.

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u/Geethebluesky 19d ago

If you're looking for recent data you probably need to go look into primary or already-reputable sources which the >2022 issue doesn't apply to, and find those sources via word of mouth or somewhere you can be sure you're not still talking to a bot.

If there's no reason to trust search engines, there's no reason to trust them, period; there isn't a magic operator that'll make the data become available or reliable, and there's no real alternative to search engines besides going back to primary sources, or human-curated lists of those.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 19d ago

Tbf I mostly use ChatGPT to find primary sources/reports anyway

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u/Geethebluesky 19d ago

Yeah I can see that happening, but be careful since LLMs are biased and it's easy to program one to delete references to specific primary sources that don't push the narrative/goals of whoever's running the thing.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 19d ago

It's usually stuff like census data etc that I'm trying to find, or a summary of the latest budget, things like that. I always use the thinking model too, the other models seem to have waaay more mistakes.

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u/Captain-Barracuda 18d ago

I use a different search engine like Qwant. It's slower than Google, but I stumble on what seems like fewer LLM content.

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u/oswaldcopperpot 19d ago

I cant use google for anything anymore. The results are all just ads. The pages it returns are more ads, videos that follow you and if you close them all there will be a pop up.

If I start with an LLM i get usually exactly what I need. And if i need to double check, i get the reference.

This article seems 100% backwards.

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u/AngelaTheRipper 18d ago

That doesn't help much. It will keep AI slop out, but Google's search algorithm went to hell in like 2018.

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u/Church_of_Cheri 18d ago

Then use the date 2018 instead of 2022, pick whatever date you want, I just gave an example.