[Waterluvian]

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.

https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs

https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf

[munk-a]

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.

[Waterluvian]

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.

[munk-a]

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).

[janalsncm]

The first of the two steps is a web search. The model didn’t answer from its trained weights.

[fpoling]

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.

[janalsncm]

> relevant pages

If you want to know what the relevant pages are, you need a search index.

[fpoling]

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.

[janalsncm]

> Index is just a part of the model

I can assure you that it is not. If you download any model off of huggingface, it does not also include an index of the internet.

That screenshot shows the model making a tool call to an external search index.

[Waterluvian]

Google search may survive as a backend service, sure.

[awad]

Do you have a free or paid ChatGPT license?

[Waterluvian]

Free Claude.

[devin]

"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.

[Waterluvian]

> 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.

[BeetleB]

> 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.

[pessimizer]

> 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.

[BeetleB]

The discussion is about Google Search results vs LLM services (summary or otherwise).

So what I'm saying is:

Google Search Results > LLM results

And yes, that includes:

Google Search Results > Google Summary on search results page