Re:Claude can now search the web
by hansmayer on Thursday March 20, 2025 @02:38PM
(#43427196)
I mean, for those of us who used it since way before the '20s, it's not really a sentiment - it's a fact. You used to be able to type in 3 words and whatever error message your stack trace was showing, and the first 3 links returned were very likely a definitive source to solving your problem.Written by a human, and believe my word for it - it was much better back then than the crap you get out of torturing whatever your LLM of choice is. However the weird MBas took it over to and did exactly what you are describing - forced people to spend more time "engaging with the platform" (to increase the revenue). As you can see, they seem to have achieved this goal, and we all now spend time reformatting our queries as they wanted us to, and yes Google search is complete crap.
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"and believe my word for it - it was much better back then than the crap you get out of torturing whatever your LLM of choice is"
I was around as well and my memories do not confirm this. But google search definitely degraded a lot.
Yes and no. You used to find niche websites more easily, but I vividly remember the frustration with ExpertsExchange results (with answers that were all paywalled).
This is one of the reasons why Kagi is so good - you can easily set it up to downrank cesspits like ExpertsExchange or Quora into oblivion.
Ah yes, Experts-Exchange was a plague for a while. They did downrank it at some point though.
Eh, this said google is suffering from its own popularity.
Google in the past was written by a human because that was really the only option. Once other humans figured out to how automate producing trace Google has gone downhill simply because of the bullshit asymmetry effect. Even if google was totally customer based, it would still be much worse than the past because of the total amount of crap that exists.
This is also why no other competitor just completely blows them away either.