Hmm, that seems weird.
> Google has become clogged with outright spam and endless layers of indirection
So.. the problem isn't search, it's that Googles ad business has destroyed googles search and created spam to try to get ad clicks.
I switched to Kagi a few months ago and I'm much happier. Most of the blog spam is just gone, and the things that slip through I can nuke.
Still though, the way that LLMs can give customized answers to complex specific questions, questions that probably don't have any specific page on the web, feels like a leveling up beyond traditional search engines.
here's a recent example: I asked how to call a particular function in some library from a little-used language, and it not only told me exactly how to do it but wrote the FFI wrapper. I could definitely have dug that information up but it would have taken a lot longer and then I'd still have had to pore over documentation to write that tedious code.
If you ask an AI for historical pictures of Hitler shaking hands with Zulu fighters, you might get them, but you'd be a fool to think that's facts. Text is exactly the same. The tech is exactly the same. The result is exactly the same. People are just so used to text being about facts via school that they are fooled, but they know about paintings from before kindergarten.
Your example isn't about facts or search though. In the case of code we can easily check the result. It's not a case of facts really.