[TRiG_Ireland]

> “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland”

People use search engines so differently. It would never occur to me to type anything like this into Google. I would type "New Zealand bank holidays" and expect to find a list (ideally on an official-looking website), and then judge for myself whether Monday was a holiday.

Google finds me this as the first result: https://www.govt.nz/browse/work/public-holidays-and-work/pub...

What would be the point of introducing any AI into this interaction?

[malux85]

I used to type "New Zealand Bank Holidays" but now my expectations have changed - my expectations of what a search engine can be has evolved because I have tools in other areas of my life that are smarter and getting better, and I expect Google to get smarter and be better. I dont want to query Google the same way as I did in 2015, because it's 2025.

The answer I want is NOT a list of public holidays, thats an intermediate. The answer I want is a single word, "Yes" or "No" that's what I want.

I can ask an LLM to refactor my codebase and then help me write a GLSL shader to display electron densitry grids and it gets it mostly right. The difficulty of getting such a complex query mostly right is WAY harder than answering my basic /basic/ question about public holidays.

Asking "Is Monday a public holiday in Auckland" is a BASIC query I expect google to be able to answer now.

I'm an engineer and have been a dev for 20 years, I know that the holiday query involves a realtime lookup of the current date and time, and possibly another query to get the holidays, so it might not be as straight forward as a forward pass through a deep net, but this is GOOGLE we are talking about, what the HELL have they been doing for the last 5 years?

The thing that really irked me about the response was that the one it gave me was SO worthless, it gave me a very bad impression about Google instantly because I thought "This thing is dumb as hell", no AI response and just a list of holidays would have been better.

[Suppafly]

>People use search engines so differently. It would never occur to me to type anything like this into Google. I would type "New Zealand bank holidays" and expect to find a list (ideally on an official-looking website), and then judge for myself whether Monday was a holiday.

I used to always use searches like that, but honestly you mostly get better results now using human language type searches because they've optimized the site to work better for those. I've hard to untrain years of search engine usage and force myself to consider how a random joe would interact with it.

[cma]

Talk to it exactly like a person with your voice and no crafted search term googlese and get a correct expert answer?

[Ylpertnodi]

Ker-ching.