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Comment by Dig1t

12 hours ago

For most people talking to Claude is a much better experience than doing a Google search.

Google search as become nothing more than a shitty AI by design. Alternative search engines are the only means to actually navigate.

I can still find core material using an alternative.

Don't worry, Google is now embedding that AI into Android's core. Rinse and repeat, expect the same results.

  • Yeah it is pretty bizarre. On Android nowadays, when you click on some article that pops up as a notification, it takes you to Google and does an AI query to fetch you the article and then you see the content in Google.

    I hate it.

Agree on google, Kagi though is usually better than ai responses. I’m actually a bit annoyed at the new Siri AI as it often does an AI response when I just want a Kagi search.

LLMs are a much better experience than what web search has become nowadays. And they probably are a better experience than what standard search could ever be.

But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.

  • Well I'm saying that asking Claude is a much better experience than the old Google search style of looking at 10 blue links.

    They are doing more than search insofar as they are:

    1. Reasoning about your question and trying to identify intent

    2. Doing the search and accessing multiple search results for you

    3. Formatting a response based on your intent and in the way you specify

    This is collapsing many steps that humans used to have to do on their own. It's more ergonomic, and gets to a better answer, faster.

Google already has AI overviews which I use instead of polluting my ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini chats.

  • The unwanted effect of AI overviews, in my experience, is turning their users into very-confidently-wrong arguers of everything.

    The upside is that telling said users to double-check the sources usually results in them realizing the AI overview was wrong, but it's still a waste of everyone's time.

    The 2021-era of of just "Not finding the results" was maybe a better outcome.

I remember years ago before LLMs my colleague told me he was impressed by my Google-fu. I was just as speechless whenever I saw him type his search queries which led nowhere. Apparently it’s a skill

Until they inevitably shit it up. To be apples to apples, gotta compare to peak google era