You can just use Gopher, you don’t need Google for this.
I’m being flippant, obviously but my point is that every now and then a new technology comes along that supplants and older one because it offers a meaningful improvement over the last. AI search vs traditional web search is definitely one of those.
My multiple experiences with ChatGPT hallucination, even at minimum temperature, leaves me preferring a web search answer. Just last week, jq hallucinated three different jq syntaxes that failed to parse.
That being said, I had been using web search for several years looking for the Get Smart episode I had seen as a kid in the 1980s where the enemy agent explains that he can't give up his suicide ring because "That's how it works, if I take it off, my wife will kill me." Google Bard found the episode on the first try.
So, I tend to fall back to LLMs only when search engines fail me.
You’re not thinking through the whole experience. The search itself is just as easy, sure. You can type the same query into both systems. The difference is in the results. Traditional web search will then return a set of links which may or may not answer you query, it’s up you you to parse them and figure out if they have the content you need or if you need to rephrase your query and try again. AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly. That’s a meaningful improvement.
> AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly.
Yep! And that's going to save you _one whole step_ when you're posting meaningless follow ups in forums filled with technical users who would have had no problem getting the information themselves.
> That’s a meaningful improvement.
It's a marginal improvement to the least meaningful activity that occurs on a daily basis. So, it's totally worth the trillions that have been invested in it. :|
which is exactly what Perplexity did. I am saying this out loud because it'll be a few years before people wrap their mind around the circus over there. not because its awesome.
1) pay google scraper api (~1000 searches/$1)
2) run the crappiest llm people won't notice is crap
People might not like the AI plug, but personally this is the one use-case I find AI the most helpful to me. The ability to query general knowledge, with natural language, often not knowing what the hell I'm talking about. And the results don't have advertisements, which I also really appreciate.