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Comment by daedalus_j | Hacker News Reader

I see this comment a lot recently and it perplexes me every time...

I don't see how LLMs are search tools. Am I using them wrong? I've asked them for information with sources and they've hallucinated entire answers including accurate-looking but entirely non-existant URLs as sources.

They've been great for getting some ideas, and summarizing things, but if I venture into an area that I'm not a domain expert in an LLM seems like a terrible way to get info.

But everyone seems to think they're the next search replacement... So I have to wonder if I've just got bad luck with them, or somehow haven't groked how to get them to give valid truthful info.

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They're a direct replacement for most of the ad-filled search queries you might have used Google for before like "Trip ideas for Paris" or "Meal plan ideas". The best part is that you can ask follow up questions with the same interface, which you can't after clicking onto some random web page match from the search results.

Using them for something like "SQL error: <some copy/pasted error>" is much more dicey, but Google is unlikely to get much ad revenue from a query like that anyways.

Sure, the use case of "find this page" isn't going away, but I'd be quite scared if I were Google, because the use case where they make the most money is going to be handled by LLMs shortly instead of search.

Totally agree. Somewhat ironically, recently I was playing with plugins with ChatGPT 4 and was testing out some of the "trip ideas" questions. I actually got great results - interesting suggestions that were personalized to what I told it about myself that I wanted - when I used "plain" ChatGPT 4. Then when I turned on the TripAdvisor plugin, the recommendations went totally to shit. It basically just spat back the first 3 items from "Top outdoor things to do in X" from TripAdvisor. No personalization, and I had just mentioned outdoor things as one of the qualities I was looking for, but I listed a bunch of others. Also no "off the beaten path" recommmendations.

I mention this because Google essentially operates like the TripAdvisor plugin, and I always just get back "Top X" lists that more often than not seem like SEO spam. I use ChatGPT now pretty much exclusively for those types of questions where I'm not simply trying to find a page on the web.

Well.. at least for technical things, phind.com is cool, if only for the list of references it displays in the rightmost column.

Much much better than anything I get with an equivalent google search.

It depends on what kind of information you need. If i need an authoritative source then LLMs cannot really replace search currently. If they improve however it could become the replacement. For example if you say find me authoritative links the AI could run the search, check the results and give your best ones. It does not do that currently but it potentially could in the future. Now this does not really replace the need for google as a search engine. It might mean that a lot of google traffic would suddenly come from OpenAI. That would probably impact googles bottom line. If the traffic gets big enough they will block it and ask for payment. Or they might even ask OpenAI to show their Ads to the user.

If you just want a quick answer then LLM can actually suffice (if you trust the answer and dont need to check). Like for example how many eggs do i need for my cake?

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