Technology
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I have kind of just been using ChatGPT 4o as my search engine, it's been working pretty well.
I wonder what the energy/environmental impact is vs a traditional search.
Completely terrible. An AI "search" takes as much electricity as hundreds to thousands of normal searches.
'AI" is TERRIBLE for climate change because they're increasing demand for electricity so much that they're keeping coal plants going that were even scheduled for decomissioning because they use A LOT of power.
I’ve been trying to find a search engine that doesn’t use AI for this very reason, but with little luck. Any suggestions?
Doesn't DuckDuckGo not have AI?
Not to my understanding?
This can be resolved by building the data centers to cold countries like here in Finland. Servers are very good at converting electricity to heat, and the heat can be used to heat homes.
Microsoft Azure data center in Espoo is going to heat up 60% of the city's district heating network.
Also the electricity here in Finland is one of the cleanest, like in all Nordics (hydro, wind, nuclear)
I mean it works ok for things that aren't important. But you never really can have too much faith in the results because it will state blatantly incorrect answers with great certainty.
At least Perplexity links to the sources
Same (in some situations). I feel like searching for "how to do X?", where X is a simple problem or knowledge, more often than not the classic search results are linking to articles that are way too long and talk around the solution way too much before actually getting to it (if at all).
Sure, I don't trust the AI responses for critical stuff, but I honestly rarely trust a random blog article either.
I used perplexity pretty exclusively for a while. Especially for work. Both have their place and use cases but when I’m looking for something truly specific or nuanced, it’s DDG and a manual search.