[benreesman]

LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today, but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years.

IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation.

I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google worked well.

Much like beer for Homer Simpson, AI is the cause of and solution to all of the Internet’s problems.

[emtel]

I’ve been using Google since about 2000/2001 or so. In fact I worked there for a time, and I still remember Craig Silverstein’s answer to “isn’t search a solved problem?” Which was: “in the future we want Google to be able to take any question and just give you the answer. So clearly we have a long way to go!”

In any case, I do not believe there was ever a time it could answer all of the questions that LLMs can today. If the question had been asked and answered on the web, Google could (and can) find it, but many questions haven’t been asked!

[kortilla]

Search isn’t the same thing as answering a question

[nuancebydefault]

Google search works at least as well as 15 years ago, the results are now just more interleaved with ads that are harder to distinguish from what you are really searching for.

That's exactly where LLMs come in, the model inside the weights has more than answers, they can find sense in data.