I tried both and it’s not even close which interface is better when it comes to answering a question. Google gives you stuff to sift through and interpret. AI just gives the answer.
Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.
AI just gives the answer... which you then need to sift through and interpret as it's often wrong.
Google's UX is terrible - but a search engine (a tool that can put you right into contact with the FAQ or forum where actual experts are discussing your problem) is always going to be powerful.
For sure. But a search engine the way we both probably agree is powerful is not Google's business. Google wants to own the interface level where everyday users come with questions/needing things and Google owns that experience. And that part is dying very quickly.
Oh, I definitely agree that Google squandered their golden goose. Had they treated search as an independent business and not a piggy bank they'd be in a much better position. An independent business would still likely fall prey to gradual enshittification but the sheer lack of investment into improving the platform while also worsening the UX has opened up the door. They likely felt quite empowered after Bing crashed and burned but weren't prepared for competitors who had QoL features and weren't backed by the biggest boogieman in tech (at the time at least).
The model just asked the crawler to get a recent copy of relevant pages and used that to give the answer. That is why AI companies experimenting with browsers or at least agentic extensions to browsers as that allows to fetch on behalf of the user directly from the device with a residential IP and ditch expensive to maintain crawling infrastructure.
Index is just a part of the model. The nice property is that the index for LLM does not need to be updated often so LLM plus index can be static. This even works for the latest news as LLM can fetch major news sites to learn the latest stories and then fetch individual articles for the final answer.
"just gives you the answer" is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.
Such is the case for people trying to poison--ahem "influence" LLM results for "what is the best restaurant in $my_locale". You're playing a dangerous game.
> is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.
Sure. But that's not what's happening here, yeah? Both examples are providing sources. Actually I'd say that the LLM is doing a better job at that. You click a button and see 9 URLs to 9 news sites.
I think for the "influence LLM results" fears, it would be ridiculous to argue about which multi-billion dollar American company can be trusted more not to manipulate you.
> Actually I'd say that the LLM is doing a better job at that. You click a button and see 9 URLs to 9 news sites.
Does it show relevant snippets for each of the 9 URLs? If not, then it's as bad as Google's AI summary. It's not that rare that the reference disagrees with the LLM.
The value of the non-LLM search engine is that in the search results, you see the relevant snippet, and if you want more information, you know quickly which links to click.
Not saying there's no place for the LLM for many search engine use cases, but a proper search engine replacement it is not.
> Does it show relevant snippets for each of the 9 URLs? If not, then it's as bad as Google's AI summary.
Sounds like you're saying that the LLM isn't any better than Google's LLM-created snippets. The claim was that Google has no moat against LLMs, and your evidence against this claim is Google's LLM generated content.
Claude Sonnet 5 Medium more or less on the timestamp of the comment:
Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?
Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.
Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?
Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.
A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]
Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…
Almost certainly. That's OK, isn't it? Folks have been Googling things poorly for as long as there has been a Google to Google with, and now they have bots that do it on their behalf.
The only issue is that the eyeballs stayed with the LLM, which allows it to hold a position that is potentially very powerful. This is particularly problematic with people who believe that computers are infallible.
The point of this thread is that you cannot replace search engines with an LLM. If your example is an LLM using a search engine as a tool call, you have not replaced the search engine. It’s still there.
Yes. An external search engine is still there, for now.
But the user doesn't necessarily know anything about that, and they don't necessarily care.
If/when the time is reached when external search engines are no longer present in the LLM loop, it seems likely that regular folks won't even notice this shift. As long as the answer-making machine keeps making answers, they won't have any reason to pay attention to this kind of back-end minutiae at all.
On a personal level if I used to do 100 google searches on a daily basis, now I would be doing only 10. And it is the case with everyone in the tech ecosystem at least. So it would be fair to assume that there share has reduced.
On the LLM side as well, I have not seen much people using Gemini vs the market share of Claude / Open AI.
The assumption of the long tail still using Gemini because it is bundled might be correct, but I am not even sure if that is something that Google will be happy with.
The LLMs I've tried don't do well with very new stuff. Like Zig for example, they tell me answers that were good for Zig 0.12 but we on 0.16 now. So I've got to feed them the latest docs, then do the AI dance.
Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.
https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs
https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf