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by quaintdev 23 days ago
The other day I found a comment here on HN and I wanted to know if it's true. I asked Gemini and here is the conversation https://gemini.google.com/share/2c1089ac6fd6

You can't do something like this with search.

1 comments

Yes you can. All you did there was paste in 9 search queries and get 9 results at once.
This points out a limitation of traditional web-based search (not limited to Google, any major search engine suffers the same issue): it's difficult to chain together a set of related questions and generate a tracking history of the results without maintaining an independent record of that yourself.

Sure, it's pretty low-friction to do this by opening a document on most platforms,[1] but using an LLM chatbot not only automates this but provides a synopsis of the findings, and if history's any guide, lowered frictions such as this tend to be the way people tend to move.

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Notes:

1. Though I'll note that opening a free-form text file on mobile OSes can be stubbornly difficult, let alone actually entering text into them. Even the simple act of copying and pasting text is remarkably higher-friction than on a desktop. In many ways the Web has gone vastly backward from text-based, CLI clients where I can 1) open my whole session in a terminal multiplexer (screen, tmux), 2) fire up a text-based web browser (w3m, lynx, etc.), and 3) just wholesale grab site metadata or result summaries and dump that to a textfile. Yes, you need a keyboard to do this efficiently, but keyboards and text-manipulation are just inherently so far superior to touch-based or speech-based interfaces it's not even funny. Touch and voice are convenient, for fast, very shallow uses. But not powerful.