231–240 of 609 posts
These are the things I usually search for:
* lazy spell check * links to resources/services * human-made content (e.g. reviews, suggestions, communities)
Genuinely curious - those who use chatbots regularly in lieu of search, what kinds of things are you prompting it for?
Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash." LLMs aren't ever…
If you wanted to know more about a new programming language named “Frob” or a plane crash that happened today, couldn’t you use an LLM like grok? Or any other LLM that’s continuously trained on trending news?
I recently configured Chrome to only use google if I prefix my search with a "g ".
Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash." LLMs aren't ever…
Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. When I search “Tom Hanks IMDB”, there’s no need to see a list of links - there’s obviously one specific page I want to visit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you wanted to know more about a new programming language named “Frob” or a plane crash that happened today, couldn’t you use an LLM like grok? Or any other LLM that’s continuously trained on trending news?
How do I know the LLM isn't lying to me? AIs lie all the time, it's impossible for me to trust them. I'd rather just go to the actual source and decide whether to trust it. Odds are pretty good that a programming language's homepage is not lying to me about the language; and I have my trust level for various news sites already calibrated. AIs are garbage-in garbage-out, and a whole boatload of garbage goes into them.
Odds are pretty good that, at least for not very popular projects, the homepage's themselves would soon be produced by some LLM, and left at that, warts and all...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the biggest argument in favor of subscription-based funding models for search I've heard. (Kagi et al.) Ad-sponsored models are going to be dead as soon as people realize they can't trust output. And because the entire benefit to LLM search is the convenience of removing a human-in-the-loop step (scanning the search results), there won't be a clear insertion/distinction point for ads without poisoning the ent…
What if the advertiser's product or service is objectively (according to either a prompt defined by the user or by the UI operator, transparently provided) the answer to the query?
Example from my work. Many of our customers will search for our company name in order to find the login page. I've watched them do this over screen share.
When they do that, the top search result is an ad slot. The second search result is our login page.
We buy ads against out own company name so that we can be the ad slot as well as the first result. Otherwise a competitor who buys ads against our company name could be the top slot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If LLMs aren't already doing this, they certainly will soon. And it'll be even more insidious and "invisible" than sponsored search results.
This is the biggest argument in favor of subscription-based funding models for search I've heard. (Kagi et al.) Ad-sponsored models are going to be dead as soon as people realize they can't trust output. And because the entire benefit to LLM search is the convenience of removing a human-in-the-loop step (scanning the search results), there won't be a clear insertion/distinction point for ads without poisoning the ent…
Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash." LLMs aren't ever…
Agreed. I think of these as two different types of searches - “page searches” where you know a page exists and want to get to it, and “content searches” where you have a more open-ended question. Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. When I search “Tom Hanks IMDB”, there’s no need to see a list of links - there’s obviously one specific page I w…
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