I tried both and it’s not even close which interface is better when it comes to answering a question. Google gives you stuff to sift through and interpret. AI just gives the answer.

Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.

https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs

https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf

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munk-a 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

AI just gives the answer... which you then need to sift through and interpret as it's often wrong.

Google's UX is terrible - but a search engine (a tool that can put you right into contact with the FAQ or forum where actual experts are discussing your problem) is always going to be powerful.

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Waterluvian 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

For sure. But a search engine the way we both probably agree is powerful is not Google's business. Google wants to own the interface level where everyday users come with questions/needing things and Google owns that experience. And that part is dying very quickly.

	▲	munk-a 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I definitely agree that Google squandered their golden goose. Had they treated search as an independent business and not a piggy bank they'd be in a much better position. An independent business would still likely fall prey to gradual enshittification but the sheer lack of investment into improving the platform while also worsening the UX has opened up the door. They likely felt quite empowered after Bing crashed and burned but weren't prepared for competitors who had QoL features and weren't backed by the biggest boogieman in tech (at the time at least).

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janalsncm 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The first of the two steps is a web search. The model didn’t answer from its trained weights.

	▲	fpoling 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The model just asked the crawler to get a recent copy of relevant pages and used that to give the answer. That is why AI companies experimenting with browsers or at least agentic extensions to browsers as that allows to fetch on behalf of the user directly from the device with a residential IP and ditch expensive to maintain crawling infrastructure.
	▲	Waterluvian 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google search may survive as a backend service, sure.

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devin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

"just gives you the answer" is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc.

Such is the case for people trying to poison--ahem "influence" LLM results for "what is the best restaurant in $my_locale". You're playing a dangerous game.

	▲	Waterluvian 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> is a problem when it is offered without context, sourcing, etc. Sure. But that's not what's happening here, yeah? Both examples are providing sources. Actually I'd say that the LLM is doing a better job at that. You click a button and see 9 URLs to 9 news sites. I think for the "influence LLM results" fears, it would be ridiculous to argue about which multi-billion dollar American company can be trusted more not to manipulate you.