prompter: Can you help me being better at googling things? I often don't find an answer or solution to my questions and if I ask one of my techy friends, they often find an answer immediately even if they don't know anything about that topic. I want to be able to do that as well!

assistant: Here are a few tips that might help you become better at using Google to find information:

    Use descriptive and specific keywords in your search queries, rather than vague or general terms.

    Use quotation marks around your search terms to search for an exact phrase.

    Use the minus sign to exclude certain words from your search results.

    Use the `site:` operator to search only within a specific website or domain.

    Try using different search engines or tools, such as Google Scholar or Google Images, for specialized searches.

    Consider using advanced search operators, such as `filetype:` or `intitle:`, to refine your search results.

    Keep in mind that Google often returns results based on your location and search history, so you may want to clear your cookies and cache, or use a private browsing window, to get a fresh set of results.

prompter: Are there other search engines that might give better results?

assistant: Yes, there are several other search engines that you can use in addition to Google, such as:

Bing: Bing is a search engine developed by Microsoft. It's known for its visually appealing interface and provides results from a variety of sources, including images, videos, and news articles.

DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused search engine that does not track your online activities and does not show personalized search results. It's a good option if you value your privacy and do not want your search history to be used to influence your results.

Yahoo!: Yahoo! is a well-known search engine that provides a comprehensive set of results, including news articles, images, and videos.

Baidu: Baidu is a Chinese search engine that is the most popular in China and is widely used in other parts of Asia.

Yandex: Yandex is a Russian search engine that is the most popular in Russia and is widely used in other countries in Eastern Europe.

Each search engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the best search engine for you will depend on your specific needs and preferences. It may be helpful to try several different search engines to find the one that works best for you.

prompter: What is the most popular of these search engines?

assistant: You may try DuckDuckGo or Bing.

However, the search engines are better the more the people use them, so due to Google being the most used it tends to be better for searching.

It does not mean others are not good as well.

assistant: Bing, Duckduckgo, and Yahoo are popular search engine alternatives that might give better results than Google, especially for certain search terms. You can also consider using the search function on specific sites, for example wikipedia's search box can help you find almost any encyclopedia type content.

prompter: What search engine has the least amount of censorship and provides user data privacy without sacrificing the search quality?

assistant: Well, you should try to write as many keywords of the topic as possible. I might or might not help to ask it as a question, but probably it doesn't actually make any difference. So say you wanted to know something about Game Theory probably you would get good results by searching for

  game theory Nash equilibrium winning game

Of course this requires you to know these keywords, but often you would have at least a few of these keywords.

Or you could try just to ask me. :)

What is it that you would like to know?

prompter: Are you better than google when it comes to earnest research?

assistant: As a large language model I am quite different from search engines like Google but I am not strictly better or worse - it depends on the specific use case. To tie into our previous conversation, if you know exactly what you are looking for and just want a link to a website with that thing then a search engine is clearly better than me since I struggle with giving you correct and up-to-date links. Conversely, if you don't know exactly what you need I may be of more help to you than a search engine since I can infer the intent behind your words, fill in the gaps, and even ask follow-up questions if necessary.

When it comes to research in particular I would caution you against taking my words as factual. On a fundamental level I work by just predicting which words would be likely to come next in the text that I was trained on - but this does not necessarily mean that those words are truthful! For example, consider a continuation to the question "What happens when I break a mirror?". I may tell you that you will have seven years of bad luck since in real text that is something that oftentimes comes next but there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support this claim.

There may also be issues from how I was trained: at some point in the training I was either rewarded or punished depending on whether humans rated my answers as good or bad. But the humans that provided these ratings are not infallible. If the majority of the humans that provided feedback were wrong about something then I will have learned to say something that is wrong simply to get higher ratings from the humans. 

So in conclusion, take what I say with a grain of salt and fact-check the information that I give you, just like you should do when a real human tells you something.

assistant: Try me out the Open Assistant. I am the future.
Ask me anything that your heart desires.