Today in chatbot uselessness: I was looking for a sentence I knew existed in my bank's website, explaining the procedure for one very specific action. The bank refuses to receive email and does not have a search function; both have been replaced by a chatbot. The bot insisted I must have misspelled my question, and kept directing me to a completely irrelevant page.
Luckily, back in 2014 I saved a PDF file which contained the answer. Once I looked it up, ctrl-f solved my problem in a minute.
I was tempted to send my request by snail mail, just to maximise their costs and pain, but I decided to use certified email instead. (This is a request they are legally forced to handle.) The snail mail address is advertised everywhere (probably because they expect people won't use it), unlike the email address.
I have been using `site:mybank.com [search terms]` semi-sucessfully, though most of the search engines are increasingly bad.
mojeek.com is increasingly better.
Sadly, en.wikipedia.org is increasingly the best web search engine over-all. Naturally, that is not #Wikipedia's purpose.
