Google was a step function, a complete leveling up in terms of usability of returned data.

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

Google’s results are themselves an AI product though. You’re just comparing different AIs.

> 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.

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.

What are you searching for? I see people complaining about this a lot but they never give examples. Google is chock full of spam, yes, but it still works for me.

OMG I remember trying Google when it was in beta, and HOLY CRAP what I had been using was like freakin night and day. AltaVista: remember that? That was the state of the art before that, and it did not compare. Night and day.

I remember Google being marginally better than Altavista but not much more.

The cool kids in those days used Metacrawler, which meta searched all the search engines.

Yes, Altavista was the major step over Yahoo! directory.

You just gave me a weird flashback to 1997.

And hey maybe when combined with GPT-4o AskJeeves will finally work as intended.

I used Metacrawler, it was dog slow. The beauty of Google was it was super fast, and still returned results that were at least as good, and often better, than Metacrawler. After using Google 2-3 times I don’t think I ever used Metacrawler again.

Google was marginally better in popular searches and significantly better for tail searches. This is a big reason why it flourished with the technical and student crowd in earlier days because those exceedingly rare sub-sub-topics would get surfaced higher in the rankings. For the esoteric topics Yahoo didn't have it in catalog and Altavista maybe had it but it was on page 86. Even before spelling correction and dozens of other useful search features were added, it was tail search and finding what you were looking for sooner. Serving speed, too, but perhaps that was more subtle for some.

Metasearch only helps recall. It won't help precision, the metasearch still needs to rank the aggregate results.

Remember dogpile? Great aggregator

With Altavista I had to go through 2 or 3 pages just to find the GNU website. I remember the Google beta as life-changing.

And I'm sure that it's doing that for some people, but... I think those are mostly in the industry. For most of the people outside the tech bubble, I think the most noticeable impact it has had on their lives so far is that they've seen it being talked about on the news, maybe tried ChatGPT once.

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.

>LLMs is doing nothing of the sort for me.

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.

For me, LLMs mostly replaced search. I run local Ollama, and whenever I need help with coding/docs/examples, I just ask Mixtral7x8B, and get an answer instantly, tailored to my needs.