chatgpt might be the most useful search tool out there. it just needs links in the output.

my question was "what open source alternatives are there to jmeter". at least with chatgpt all of the results are, or were, legitimate open source projects.

google's results are, as expected, full of seo-optimized websites looking for clicks. google is essentially useless for any search that might have commercial potential (to be fair, it has been for years).

i always hold out a little hope for duck duck go, but it's really a list of the same seo-optimized sites (although, you know, stack overflow and quora are down there near the end).

what's the tl;dr? i don't know. i think i'm going continue to try to start my searches with chatgpt and then use duck duck go or google to look up the websites. i wonder if i could automate that...

#chatgpt #search

@toddsundsted if you haven't tried out Kagi, I recommend it as a search engine. In my experience it handles most queries better than Google or DDG, and the ability to adjust your preferences is great. In particular, for programming-related queries, it tends to prefer primary sources over SEO garbage (e.g. official documentation instead of w3schools).

For ChatGPT as a search engine, I'd be wary of the factuality of anything it puts out. As pointed out in this post, these models are trained to sound correct, not be correct. If it happens to know the right answer, it will probably give it to you, but if it doesn't, it will happily lie to you. And unless you then go do the research you were trying to avoid (google, etc), you probably can't tell the difference.

@evan wow, that flew under my radar! i'll check it out.

my theory was that for the right kinds of questions chatgpt might be a good starting source—kind of like how i use wikipedia. its response to my question demonstrated what i was going for. it didn't just invent fictitious tools—it named existing tools (though one wasn't open source anymore and the other was the tool i was looking for alternatives to). you are correct that i still had to do the research, but the starting set was just so much more useful!