this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Search engines don't make claims. They just deliver search results. People who fail to understand the difference have a really hard time interpreting the results.
I wish search engines "just delivered search results". Unfortunately, they now directly and confidently answer questions with complete nonsense.
The vast majority of those answers are still just citing another source, though. The only exceptions I can think of are things like math and unit conversions.
My point is mostly that people insist on treating search engines (and now LLMs) as oracles of truth, and they did that even back when all you got was a list of links with small excerpts. It annoys me to no end when people fail so thoroughly at such a basic test of media literacy and then immediately try to place the blame on someone else.
Where the info comes from doesn't exactly change that it's a problem.
You can talk about media literacy, but why even have the thing exist if it can't provide correct answers. That's its only reason for existing.
You seem to be one of the very people I'm complaining about. The point of a search engine absolutely is not to spoon feed you correct answers. It's to find information on the internet that's relevant to a topic. There's lots of wrong information on the internet and it's not a search engine's job to decide for you what's right and what's wrong.
Nobody is saying otherwise. The problem being discussed here is that search engines present themselves as "deciding what's right and wrong" and present themselves as "spoon feeding correct answers". If we really want to improve media literacy, we can begin by advocating for our search tools to not misrepresent the presentation of their data.
Yeah, but it's changing. Search Engines today don't just present you links to other websites, but have also started to take some of that information and show it to you directly. First it was by showing you little excerpts, but now with Bing Chat it's becoming a lot more developed.
With Bing Chat, you ask your search engine a question, and it will answer you directly in a conversation-like manner. This feels a lot more like it's not just showing you a list of sources, but it's answering you directly, making claims, stating "facts" etc. You can easily forget it's just a search engine, can't fault people for this.