this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.
Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it's split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.
Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.
Sure, but IME it is very far from doing the things that good, well written and informed human content could do, especially once we're talking about forums and the like where you can have good conversations with informed people about your problem.
IMO, what ever LLMs are doing that older systems can't isn't greater than what was lost with SEO ads-driven slop and shitty search.
Moreover, the business interest of LLM companies is clearly in dominating and controlling (as that's just capitalism and the "smart" thing to do), which means the retention of the older human-driven system of information sharing and problem solving is vulnerable to being severely threatened and destroyed ... while we could just as well enjoy some hybridised system. But because profit is the focus, and the means of making profit problematic, we're in rough waters which I don't think can be trusted to create a net positive (and haven't been trust worthy for decades now).