Google (as it originally) existed wasn't a source of information, it was an *index* of it. You were trusting google as a source for {search_query}, you were trusting the links it gave as a source (based on your own evaluation). LLMs are fundamentally different, because you are trusting the software to actually generate the information in a truthful way.
replyIf you use google (sans AI), you're putting some trust in their page ranking algorithm. If you use it with AI, you're trusting the same algorithm (since that's how the model gets it's sources), but then you're trusting the model to evaluate the sources for credibility and extract the information you actually want.
Pagerank is just a popularity contest, doesn't say anything about trust. AI probably does a better job determining trustworthyness than pagerank.
replyDo you think the LLM reads every page on the internet before generating your answer? Of course not. What happens is that it use some sort of ranking algorithm to pick the pages that are most likely to answer your query and reads *them* (at best. At worst it just makes something up). You aren't avoiding the problems with ranking algorithms by asking an LLM, you're taking all of those problems, adding more problems on top, and pretending that this is somehow better.
replyI routinely run into Claude Opus and Fable making basic mistakes like misunderstanding a simple negation, which would be on top of whatever reliability issues there are with a source. I think that means it is functionally very different.
reply> Can google be trusted ? Or facebook ?
replyNo. Neither can be trusted as far as you can throw them. They're both incredibly invasive data brokers. Their customer facing products are just vehicles to show ads and Hoover up more PII and behavioral data on everyone.