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There needs to be retrieval, but ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs and they would probably do better. Legacy search engines do both parts, and their ranking is highly gameable judging by how SEOed they are.

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Spoiler: regular search ranking doesn't see very many results, either. I mean, have you seen the results for a crowded query like this? They are trash.

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Well, for some factual queries it can just know the answer inherently. Plus you can provide it all the curated data feeds that currently back first party results. But most of all, if there's no simple ranking signals to game, then SEO gets a lot harder.

And what, pray tell, will this search engine search?

If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?

This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.

You know what's replacing the open web and reddit? Conversations with AI models that were never posted to the open web.

That's exactly why they MUST have everyone opted in, even if they don't like it.

Peer review is what made information on sites like Stack Overflow and reddit have value. One on one conversations with an LLM are not an equivalent and direct substitution.

Multiply those conversations by a thousand and you got some sort of ground truth.

It's a shame they will be siloed and get biased over time. I think AI labs will come up with ways to not-compete in certain areas too.

That depends on whether the purpose of web search is to get answers or find references. Since students are still developing their reading and research skills, the latter goal is much more relevant in an educational setting.

AI boosters have a vested interest in getting people to forget the distinction between primary and secondary sources because they want to elevate chatbot output to the same legitimacy as primary sources.

The problem is that Google's AI search basically doesn't work. It routinely can't understand even simple prompts and is the only AI I've used that routinely hallucinates.

And this is good for academia?