In the past two years most of my Google searches were: "______ vs ______", <product name> review, and <subject> reddit.

Sometime in the last two months I noticed myself going straight to ChatGPT, and Gemini flash when my free credits ran out. And ocasionally some Reddit threads.

And then the question is: why? Is it because the LLM is better, or because the search engine is worse?

I just purchased a monitor, from among the cheaper 4K 27" ones I could find. I’m in India, so they may not be the same models you’d get in places like the USA: maybe the situation is better there. When trying to compare them, or even find reviews of them, I could not find anything useful through a search engine. Exactly zero useful things. Not a single review of my four candidates. Oh, a couple of video “reviews” probably in Hindi… but I have learned to utterly scorn that category as consistently devoid of content; and a couple of “review” sites… with only copies of the first-party marketing material.

This part of the web seems to be just dead.

As for LLMs, well, I’m sceptical that they actually are all that much better: where is the information coming from? I’m deeply suspicious that they just look better. It’s well-established that they’re magnificent at conning.

For my own experience, I’ve tried DuckDuckGo’s Assist a few times, which is GPT-4o, and I haven’t been impressed with it. Almost everything it comes up with is superficial, or wrong.