[woopsn]

> Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results.

Don't get me wrong, search has become extremely problematic, ... but how much effort does it take really? Compared to writing a letter, reading a map, walking half a mile etc?

The google results for "music festivals in boone north carolina august" are completely adequate. If not then you search again, sure. What makes that "a lot of effort" compared to "asking follow-up questions like you would in a conversation"?

According to Sequoia Capitol there is a $600B hole in this sector at the moment, which continues to grow.[1] They need to invent something akin to the global smartphone market, over the next 2-4 years. Some thing new that solves significant problems for people that aren't already solved for free.

[1] https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/

[variadix]

Depending on how SEO’d the thing you’re looking for is it can range from easy (looking up docs, specs, etc.) to impossible (product recommendations) to find quality information (without knowing what sources are reliable beforehand). I’m not sure that LLMs will fix the problem, seems like curation is the issue and none of the major players are interested in that.

[rkwz]

> Don't get me wrong, search has become extremely problematic, ... but how much effort does it take really?

Many days or weeks infact

The provided examples don't illustrate the problem properly. Let's say you're new to a problem domain but don't know it's a highly specialized domain. So you don't know the keywords to search but have a vague sense of what needs to be accomplished.

If the new tool can make sense of your vague problem and point you in right direction, it would be great.

Don't know if this is actually a $600B sized problem.

[zamadatix]

Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something. AI has almost the inverse balance, pairing the two is a decent savings (and also what Bing/Google are trying to do from the opposite end of things).

Whether this gets AI out of being a money pit remains to be seen.

[OrigamiPastrami]

> Current search is great for facts, alright for generic questions, and annoying for answering something.

I feel like Google used to be pretty great at answering questions until they started pushing ads more aggressively into their results, and then intentionally gimping their results (for instance if you put quotes around a word Google will happily ignore it, whereas this used to actually be an enforced rule).

I'm not sure AI is the solution to this problem at all. I think it's about misaligned incentives and trying to shoehorn a new cash cow into the mix.

[zamadatix]

What I mean by generic questions is traditional search is pretty alright (in the past and now) if you threw at it "how to set an arbitrary bit in a number". You get plenty of generic articles answering the question just fine, even if you have to scroll past some ads these days. If you were instead using quotes to get a specific answer to something you were doing like 'How to set the "18th bit" in a "u32" using "Zig"' then that's more what I meant by "answering something" without wanting to go piece together the answer from generic articles yourself then search does and has always really sucked (unless you're extremely lucky and some dude posted exactly that example out on the web). This is where LLMs shine, you can ask that question and get an exact answer for your scenario (plus the generic explanation of why it works if that's what you really want) without having to piece together sources yourself.

Misaligned incentives will of course make either side worse but search engines ~2010 were (and now still are) far from being good solutions for all types of queries, they were just closer to being good than anything else we had for them.

[Dalewyn]

>how much effort does it take really?

Depending on the query, substantial effort.

I know I've taken to just asking Bing (read: ChatGPT) if I just want something answered (FSVO answered) because sometimes I just don't feel like speaking Search Engine across multiple attempts to try and find something.