Hi,
simple question: is it me or we almost stopped using Google heavily as before because of LLMs?
Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#2I don't care for their wonky LLM at the top of their search results, it's so inaccurate it makes me think less of google.
Having said that I haven't found a good pure search alternative.
As for using an LLM FOR search sometimes I do that but LLM's seem very fixated on maybe a dozen or so results in my experience and that's not entirely useful to me. LLM's seem really bad at iterating ... search for some reason. Code it can do but search it seems to just get stuck.
I'll ask it for a given application, open source, and it just spits out the same couple apps ... not open source and no amount of prompting will change that.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#3[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#4I switched to Kagi, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude in various combinations because Google search results were so bad and then they started shoving the AI slop at the top of search results.
Give me good search, I’ll pay, but if you shovel dreck to sell a story to investors, imma bounce.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#5I’d switched to DuckDuckGo years ago but now it’s a combination of Perplexuty and Deep Research and a few other LLMs
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#6It isn't just you.
I really dislike the AI slop at the top of Google search results. It is an annoying distraction that forces me to scroll past every single time, multiple times a day. Bing is just as bad with its LLM although it is also a worse search engine.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#7Google shoves an LLM in your face anyway, so may as well craft an LLM friendly query with a paid LLM rather than their crappy free LLM.
I ended up moving to Ecosia anyway, as that was where I personally hit the tipping point of search becoming infrequent and a lot of additional Google work. Previously the cost of that was too high.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#8I wrote a little paragraph explaining why I like Brave Search but accidentally closed the tab.
But, give it a try. It does have AI summaries (I find them quite helpful) but you can easily turn it off in settings if you don't like/want them.
https://search.brave.com/help/ai
Alternately, give the udm14 trick a try.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#9I only use LLMs to resolve trivial disputes about pedestrian scientific concepts. I haven’t stopped using search engines, I just stop hoping they’ll produce convenient answers in certain contexts - like the aforementioned quick resolution dispute about topics in which both my interlocutor and I are amateurs. But when I’m doing serious work I know I can’t trust an LLM so I don’t use them for anything truly meaningful
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or we almost stopped using Google because of LLMs?
#10I still search quite a bit, but with Kagi. I've been increasingly using their quick answer feature (sufficing a query with a question mark), which prompts a RAG (I think) LLM response. It blows my mind that Kagi's output with their AI responses is just so much better than the Google ones. It cites it's sources and then I can click in and go to the specific article to verify. For really simple things that accuracy being only 95% being fine, it's been an absolute dream.
My favorite example is asking for the release date of some media. We've had to sift through ten paragraph articles filled with nonsense for years, just to see at the bottom that "the release date has not been announced yet".