Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?
I don&#x27;t understand this hype and I feel like I&#x27;m looking at different products than everyone else is. There are very few complaints I have about Google that I think this technology helps solve, and for most of my complaints, getting summaries of searches makes the situation worse, not better. To be completely clear: even if the AI was <i>perfect</i>, I don&#x27;t know that I want even an actual human being to sit down and summarize an answer to my question rather than show me a list of search results.<p>The problem with search is not that our answers aren&#x27;t summarized well, it&#x27;s that the quality of information returned for those searches is getting increasingly worse, and we are getting increasingly worse at categorizing or filtering that information in any useful way. And LLMs pulling information in and summarizing it for me is... not helpful? It&#x27;s summarizing the same garbage, except now sometimes it also summarizes it wrong.<p>But it&#x27;s not even an issue with the quality (although the quality of information from LLMs is also pretty over-hyped I think). Conceptually, I don&#x27;t know that this is a product that I would ever want. I can&#x27;t think of any time where I&#x27;ve sat down to do a search on Google or DuckDuckgo and thought, &quot;You know what I want? I want these results presented to me in a less structured format using natural language and with less granular knowledge about where each specific statement is coming from.&quot;<p>At least Bing seems to be trying to do inline citations in some of its answers, which is a step up over Google&#x27;s AI announcement, I guess?<p>Maybe I&#x27;m just in the minority on that. Users seem to like this a lot. But my ideal version of the Internet is one that decreases the number of abstractions and layers and summaries between myself and primary data rather than increasing them. My ideal Internet is a tool that makes it easier for me to actually find things, not a tool that increases the layers between me and the raw source&#x2F;information that I&#x27;m looking for. I already have enough trouble needing to double-check news summaries of debates, events, and research. Getting another summary of the summaries doesn&#x27;t seem helpful to me?<p>I can think of some ways where I might use an LLM in search, even really exciting ways where maybe it could help with categorization or grouping, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like Google&#x2F;Bing are interested in pursuing any of that. I look at both the Bing and Google announcements and just think, &quot;why are you making it worse?&quot; But who knows, maybe the actual products will sell me on the concept more.