[throwuxiytayq]

> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.

Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.

People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.

[turtlesdown11]

> The accuracy isn’t perfect

The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?

[fzeroracer]

The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research.

Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.

[throwuxiytayq]

Of course you have to fact check - but verification is much faster and easier than searching from scratch.

[ptx]

How is verification faster and easier? Normally you would check an article's citations to verify its claims, which still takes a lot of work, but an LLM can't cite its sources (it can fabricate a plausible list of fake citations, but this is not the same thing), so verification would have to involve searching from scratch anyway.

[hombre_fatal]

Because it gives you an answer and all you have to do is check its source. Often you don’t have to do that since you have jogged your memory.

Versus finding the answer by clicking into the first few search results links and scanning text that might not have the answer.

[ptx]

As I said, how are you going to check the source when LLMs can't provide sources? The models, as far as I know, don't store links to sources along with each piece of knowledge. At best they can plagiarize a list of references from the same sources as the rest of the text, which will by coincidence be somewhat accurate.

[a1j9o94]

Pretty much every major LLM client has web search built in. They aren't just using what's in their weights to generate the answers.

When it gives you a link, it literally takes you to the part of the page that it got its answer from. That's how we can quickly validate.

[sejje]

LLMs provide sources every time I ask them.

They do it by going out and searching, not by storing a list of sources in their corpus.

[skywhopper]

For most things, no it isn’t. The reason it can work well at all for software is that it’s often (though not always) easy to validate the results. But for giving you a summary of some topic, no, it’s actually very hard to verify the results without doing all the work over again.

[antonvs]

> People must be in complete denial

That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.