Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

Yes, all my searching is using Google and I haven't had any issues with the results or finding what I want.

The idea of taking an answer from any black box is profoundly unacceptable. Even if the black box didn't hallucinate. Why wouldn't I prefer to follow a link to a site so that I can evaluate its trustworthiness as a source?

Why would I want to have a conversation in a medium of ambiguity when I could quickly type in a few keywords instead? If we'd invented the former first, we'd build statues of whoever invented the latter.

Why would I want to use a search service that strips privacy by forcing me to be logged in and is following the Netflix model of giving away a service cheap now to get you to rely on it so much that you'll have no choice but to keep paying for it later when it's expensive and enshittified?

I still prefer tranditional search engines over LLMs but I admit, its results feels worse than it has traditionally.

I don't like LLMs for two reasons:

* I can't really get a feel for the veracity of the information without double checking it. A lot of context I get from just reading results from a traditional search engine is lost when I get an answer from a LLM. I find it somewhat uncomfortable to just accept the answer, and if I have to double check it anyways, the LLM's answer is kind of meaningless and I might as well use a traditional search engine.

* I'm missing out on learning opertunities that I would usually get otherwise by reading or skimming through a larger document trying to find the answer. I appreciate that I skim through a lot of documentation on a regular basis and can recall things that I just happened to read when looking for a solution for another problem. I would hate it if an LLM would drop random tidbits of information when I was looking for concrete answers, but since its a side effect of my information gathering process, I like it.

If I were to use an AI assistant that could help me search and curate the results, instead of trying to answer my question directly. Hopefully in a more sleek way than Perplexity does with its sources feature.

It depends on what I'm after. I still use regular searches quite a bit.

But a lot of my classic ADHD "let's dive into this rabbit hole" google sessions have definitely been replaced by AI deep searches like Perplexity. Instead of me going down a rabbit hole personally for all the random stuff that comes across my mind, I'll just let perplexity handle it and I come back a few minutes later and read whatever it came up with.

And sometimes, I don't even read that, and that's also fine. Just being able to hand that "task" off to an AI to handle it for me is very liberating in a way. I still get derailed a bit of course, but instead of losing half an hour, it's just a few seconds of typing out my question, and then getting back to what I've been doing.

> I continue to believe that LLMs are favored by people who don't care about developing an understanding of subjects based on the most authoritative source material. These are people who don't read science journals, they don't read technical specifications, they don't read man pages, and they don't read a program's source code before installing the program. These are people who prioritize convenience above all else.

This makes a lot of sense to me. As a young guy in the 90's I was told that some day "everyone will be fluent in computers" and 25 years later it's just not true. 95% of my peers never developed their fluency, and my kids even less so. The same will hold try for AI, it will be what smartphones were to PCs: A dumbed down interface for people who want to USE tech not understand it.