[jrmg]

Search engines don’t do that any more - they just give you a bunch of SEO spam sites, now mostly filled with plausible slop. Answers from search are _less_ reliable than answers from an LLM now.

I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines are.

Model collapse everywhere.

[lunar_mycroft]

If the LLM is capable of providing good citations, then those citations could be returned in the same format as traditional search engines, not the new, LLM generated content first format. If they aren't capable of providing good citations, then the suggestion I was replying to is incorrect (and you'd have no way of knowing if they were right or not)

[nostrademons]

In general users don't like to have to follow citations, even if they should. They'd rather have an answer right in front of them, even if there's a good chance that it's wrong.

Google, like most consumer product companies, designs for the majority. Citations are a niche feature for the 5-10% of users that like to do their own research. The majority just wants an answer, which has been the direction Google's gone in since Knowledge Panels and the Answer OneBox came out in 2012.

[lunar_mycroft]

That might make sense (at least on the first order, second order effects would still be horrible) if the LLM generated answer was reliably correct. It isn't.