…And how should I ask it? I am trying to find out what company sells the oldest aged cheddar cheese, and I want to avoid multiple pages of “age” and “cheddar” and “cheese” and “stores that sell cheese”…and adverts in general. I am asking for the oldest cheddar cheese for sale, not “all the possible ways the letters in the phrase can be put together to make a word”.
It’s going to be somewhat challenging, because your question, regardless of exact wording and search engine, implies buying a food product, and that’ll trigger the keyword marketing algorithms on most of them.
FWIW, I just googled using the search term “what company makes the longest-aged cheddar cheese” – so I didn’t even use the words “buy” or “sell,” and I still got a lot of shopping and sponsored results.
As part of that search, Google AI did give me some specific makers, with links. It looks like 15 to 20 years is about the max, but I have no idea how exhaustive that is.
Follow-up: I asked the same question on Brave, which had far fewer retail results.
It also pointed me to this thread on the Cheese subreddit, which you may find informative, as it asks exactly your question:
Use chatGPT.
I just Googled for “oldest cheddar you can buy.”
Well, we can start. Here’s one for $200/lb that’s 23 years old:
I did find another Wisconsin place that a few years ago actually found some cheddar “in the back” that was 40 years old that they put on sale, but that seemed to be a fortuitous one-off.
Any, yes, I found it with the help of Chat GPT. These types of searches AI can be helpful with. Make sure you ask it to “Think hard” and check its sources.
So the 23-year-old is the oldest I could find so far.
ETA: Oh, wait. Here’s a 25-year-old:
Just do incremental searches with “25-year-old cheddar” “26-year-old cheddar,” etc., and see what bites.
The OP would get more expert replies if the title included what he was asking about.
The search engine you desire is @Qadgop_the_Mercotan. He is the Head Cheese of all things cheddar.
It seems like the OP’s question is actually kinda twofold:
- How do I find out what the oldest cheddar cheese is that I can buy?
- Which search engine is going to give me a straight answer to my entire question as a single sentence, and minimize the number of paid ads and SEO-tuned responses that are only partially applicable to my question?
Much more the second than the first. This might help when I search for other things. Telling me how to solve the problem is usually better than handling me the solution on a silver platter.
I actually googled (yeah, I know, ironic) “search engines which do not show shopping sites,” which is how I got to the answer of “try Brave” above.
Part of the problem is that, as I understand it, traditional search engines are still largely keyword-based, even though they have started to build in some semantic and “intent” smarts; because of this, they may still struggle with parsing parse your entire search term as a singular question. Someone upthread suggested using an AI tool for this sort of search; AIs like ChatGPT have rapidly become the go-to “search engine” for a lot of people (for better and for worse).
This is the perfect use case for an AI like ChatGPT. Ask it. You can then further research the answers because now you have something to go on. If you find contradictions, challenge it. If you need more information, ask it. It really is the ultimate “search engine”, though more like an interactive research assistant.
Really? Why can’t you just pose the question in the Google search box? What more does asking ChatGPT get you? I’m still skeptical of the usefulness of the LLMs.
That sounds to be exactly what @Czarcasm tried, and was unhappy with how many results weren’t on-topic, as well as how many were paid ads.
Because there’s a good reason that hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in LLMs. It’s all about the breadth, depth, and general quality of information, and the ability to interact with the AI in a context-preserving conversation. With the latest updates to ChatGPT, it’s literally like the difference between just Googling something and having an actual conversation with a knowledgeable expert.
A traditional search engine can find sources for 20-year-old cheddar, and 21-year-old cheddar, and 22-year-old cheddar, and so on. But it lacks the processing to turn that discrete knowledge into “of all the cheddar-selling sites I know of, this one has the oldest”.
AIs do have the processing for that. But the tradeoff is that we (and they themselves) don’t understand how that processing works, and so it isn’t always reliable.
There’s room for a middle ground, a search engine that has all of the raw information and can do deterministic processing on it. But it’d only do specific sorts of processing that someone thought to program it to do. So unless someone anticipated your cheese question, or something sufficiently similar to it, that deterministic-processing search engine still wouldn’t be able to handle your cheese question. AIs are open-ended enough that they can handle (at least approximately) almost any question, without needing to be specifically programmed for all of them.
“Ask an expert” could indeed be the best search strategy.