AI just gives the answer... which you then need to sift through and interpret as it's often wrong.
replyGoogle'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.
replyOh, 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).
replyThe first of the two steps is a web search. The model didn’t answer from its trained weights.
replyThe 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.
replyGoogle search may survive as a backend service, sure.
reply"just gives you the answer" is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.
replySuch 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.
replySure. 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.