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0 pointsvidarh6mo ago0 comments

Because the responses are often distilled down from the same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts.

I use Claude a lot. I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models.

But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as a general purpose replacement for Google unless you specifically prompt it to search.

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rerdavies6mo ago· 1 in thread

Google search results: a dozen sponsored links; a dozen links to videos (which I never use -- I'd rather read than watch); six or seven pages with gamed SEOs; if you're lucky, what you actually want is far down near the end of the first page, or perhaps at the top of the second page; the other 700 pages of links are ... whatever. Repeat for our five times with variously tweaked queries, hoping that what you actually want will percolate up into the first or second page.

Claude: "Provide me links to <precise description of what you actually want". Result: 4 or 5 directly relevant links, most of which are useful, and it happens on the first query.

Claude is dramatically more efficient than Google Search.

vidarhOP6mo ago

> Claude: "Provide me links to <precise description of what you actually want". Result: 4 or 5 directly relevant links, most of which are useful, and it happens on the first query.

Which, as I pointed out, is not the point, as you're advocating exactly the kind of prompting I said wouldn't be a problem. It's not how she uses it.

abustamam6mo ago

> unless you specifically prompt it to search.

Ah, that's a good call-out. I don't use Claude aside from in Cursor; I use ChatGPT for normal queries and it's pretty good about doing searches when it doesn't think it knows the answer. Of course it'll search when prompted, but it'll often search without prompting too. I just mistakenly assumed that your fiancée's usage of Claude implied Claude was actually searching as well.

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