[wildrhythms]

The problem is tech illiterate know-nothings I encounter daily in management (at a tech company no less) have been told or fooled into thinking these LLMs are some sort of knowledge engine. I even see it on HN when people suggest using a LLM in place of a search engine. How did we get to this point?

[fastneutron]

We got to this point because search engine results have become so polluted with sponsored links, low quality blogspam and SEO’d clones of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow that LLM responses are the only source of direct information that actually answers the original question.

[gosub100]

isn't it funny that we've come full circle to just paying for search results? Which was something Google could have done long ago (and there's a new company offering paid-search services that people talk about on here, I can't recall the name).

So they create the problem by increasing ads and spam in the result, then sell you the A.I. solution. What's next? Put more insidious ads that still answer the original query but have an oblique reference to a paid product?

[thfuran]

Google charging users for search would help clear up search results a bit if they didn't also charge sites for higher placement, but it wouldn't fix SEO. As long as sites have a way to get money for you clicking on them, whether by ad views or product sales, they'll have an incentive to get ranked higher in search results.

[kevincali]

The paid search service is called Kagi. It's pretty good.

[notnaut]

It is basically 100x better at providing accurate and succinct responses to simple questions than a google search is nowadays. Trying to get it to explain things or provide facts about things is dubious, but so is a huge majority of the crap google feeds to you when you aren’t technically adept.