I second that. I remember when Google search first came out. Within a few days it completely changed my workflow, how I use the Internet, my reading habits. It easily 5 ~ 10x the value of Internet for me over a couple of weeks.
LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.
ChatGPT does this again for me. I am routinely getting zero useful results on the first page or two of Google searches, but AI is answering or giving me guidance quickly.
Maybe this would not seem such an improvement if Google's results were like they were 10 years ago and not barely usable blogspam
To me, this just sounds like Google Search has become shit, and since Google simply isn't going to give up the precious ad $$$ that the current format is generating, the next best thing is ChatGPT. But this is different from saying that ChatGPT is a similar step up like Search was.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that Google Search has become unusable. Google basically destroyed it's best product (for users), by turning it into an ad riddles shovelware cesspit.
That ChatGPT is similarly good like Google Search used to be, is a tragedy. Basically we had a conceptually simple product that functioned very well, and we are replacing it with a significantly more complex product.
The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.
Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.
And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.
That's not to say it won't have more significant impact in the future; I wouldn't know. But so far, I've yet to see the hype get realised.
Don't use it for things you're already an expert in, it can't compare to you yet.
Use it for learning new things, or for things you aren't very good at and don't want to bother with. For these it's incredible.
