December 9 2024
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There is already a better search engine than google. It is Youtube
Farhad Manjoo, New York Times
last updated:
Feb 07,2023
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Will ChatGPT kill Google?
That has been the hot question in Silicon Valley since November, when the
artificial intelligence company OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot so
astoundingly human seeming that many saw it as a preview of how we will all
search for information one day. Sure, the speculation is jumping the gun. As I
and lots of others have pointed out, ChatGPT is interesting but far from ready
for prime time.اضافة اعلان
Still, talk of Google’s demise is not unwarranted. The search engine
turned 24 in September, which in tech qualifies as prehistoric, and I am one of
the many pundits who have complained about its waning utility in its
near-monopolistic dotage.
But there is no need to wait for ChatGPT to find a better source of
information than Google. For a large number of my most important internet
searches these days — when I am looking to learn something, fix something, buy
something or decide something — there are two places I look most often, neither
of them Google.
One of these places is Reddit, a site whose outsize role in my life I plan
to write about in a future column.
If you want to make a soufflé, fix a clogged drain, learn guitar, improve your golf swing, or do essentially anything that is best understood by watching someone else do it, there is almost no point searching anywhere other than YouTube.
The other is YouTube. The gargantuan video site is a lot of things to a
lot of people — in different ways, YouTube is a little bit like TikTok, a
little like Twitch and a little like Netflix — but I think we underappreciate
how often YouTube is a better Google. That is, often it is the best place
online to find reliable and substantive knowledge and information on a huge
variety of subjects.
Much of the rest of this column is going to sound like falling-over praise
for YouTube, so let me say at the jump that I understand its many problems. For
one thing, “reliable,” on the internet, is relative. YouTube has been rolling out
policies against misinformation and extremism that are more stringent than they
used to be, but like just about every other place online, it can be a font of
lies and a haven for radicalism, and its engagement-hungry recommendation
algorithm can gin up sensationalist controversy just as surely as Facebook or
Fox News.
YouTube also wields enormous power over the ecosystem of online creators,
and it offers no relief from monopoly. It is owned by Alphabet, also the parent
company of Google, so battling Google’s market power by switching to YouTube is
like buying Doritos instead of Fritos to stick it to Frito-Lay.
All that said, there are many times that YouTube is the internet’s best
source for answers to your queries.
The most obvious is when you are trying to learn some physical skill. If
you want to make a soufflé, fix a clogged drain, learn guitar, improve your
golf swing, or do essentially anything that is best understood by watching
someone else do it, there is almost no point searching anywhere other than
YouTube.
I have written before about my hipsterish penchant for taking up old-timey
pastimes like ceramics and sourdough. Hobbies like these tend to involve
developing an intuition for the craft that can come only with practice — but
that practice, I have found, can be supercharged by watching other people do
the thing many, many times.
My pottery class took place once a week for just a few hours, not enough
time with the clay to develop much of a feel for it. But in the week between
classes I would watch dozens of YouTube ceramists throwing pots, and each time
I went to class I felt I had absorbed some of their tricks. I’m certain I got
much better much faster than I would have in the days before YouTube; actually,
if I hadn’t been able to see other people’s progress online, I might have just
quit.
It is not just hobbies and household skills that you can pick up on
YouTube. If you want to understand something of any real complexity, I have
found that a video on YouTube is often more informative than what is available
elsewhere on the web. You may have read a few months ago about the physics
breakthrough in which researchers created a tiny wormhole using a quantum
computer. A 17-minute video by Quanta magazine got me closer to comprehending
it than anything else.
YouTube is not a substitute for real-life instruction, but as many parents
learned during the pandemic, YouTube can be a tremendously helpful aid for
students learning math, science, history, and other subjects. It has been more
successful than many rival online platforms at fostering a set of creators who
produce high-quality educational content; check out channels like Crash Course
and Veritasium.
And then there are all the university lectures. YouTube abounds with whole
semesters of popular courses from the country’s most prestigious schools. A few
years ago, I went on a Shakespeare bender because I found an irresistible set
of lectures by Marjorie Garber, a Shakespeare expert at Harvard. I learned of
Richard Feynman’s greatness after watching some of his famous lectures. And if
you ever find yourself missing high school chemistry, do yourself a favor and
watch MIT professor Donald Sadoway’s intro course.
A lot of parents are leery of YouTube, and I do not think they are wrong
to worry. There is a lot of terrible stuff there — videos that are hateful,
ignorant, foolish, conspiratorial or otherwise inappropriate. There’s also a
lot of plain inanity; a huge part of YouTube is no better than the vast
wasteland of pre-golden-age television.
YouTube is not a substitute for real-life instruction, but as many parents learned during the pandemic, YouTube can be a tremendously helpful aid for students learning math, science, history and other subjects.
But this is unavoidable; there are also a lot of terrible books in the
library. At the same time, I am routinely stunned by some of the things my kids
have learned from YouTube that I never could have when I was their age. We were
watching “Saving Private Ryan” the other day when my 12-year-old began pointing
out historical inaccuracies in the film’s depiction of D-Day. I do not think I
had even heard of D-Day at his age. Thanks to his copious consumption of
YouTube war documentaries, he cannot stop talking about the North African
campaign.
Whither Google search, in all this? Many of my Google searches are
navigational (e.g., looking up a Wikipedia page or an article I read last week)
or in some other way very simple (looking for some word’s synonyms, tomorrow’s
weather). For anything more, it’s Google’s sibling I will check first.