But today neither of your search phrases will give any useful results on google search, while LLMs get it right once in a while.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill

I would argue this was always a bit silly, and mostly due to UI shortcomings of search platforms. The fact you needed to add "magic" params to shape the results speaks volumes. Any UI that fundamentally tries to reshape how you are expect to interact, or impose certain "behavior" is wrong. This is also why we are using touch instead of a stylus.

AI won because they took the paradigm of presenting a new way of doing something in a familiar way. An LLM works very similarly how you would ask a knowledgeable friend, and google worked similarly how an engineer would query a database.

Nothing has changed, though. In my office the ones that have really boosted productivity are the ones putting in the effort to craft solid prompts and understand when to move that slider on reasoning effort and model selection. Or understand and put thought into how to leverage the tool, like project folders with the context to all or part of your job the model can reference. Everyone else throws a lazy prompt at the default 'instant' model, gets a crap response and then they give up.

It wasn't a worthwhile skill anyways.

Finding the right words to please the currently popular search engine is not a skill that easily translate elsewhere. It is not like programming where precision is key, searching has always been a bit fuzzy. Fact checking, crossing information, understanding primary sources, etc... these are real skills, typing words in a search engine is meh.

That we now have language models that allow let machines capture the intent of the query without the need for special incantations is a clear win to me.

Where LLMs are really excellent compared to search engines is when you don't really know what you want. You don't need to know about "Cantor diagonal proof", you just need to know "That math thing where you trace a diagonal across decimal numbers", and the LLM will immediately tell you about Cantor.

You're absolutely wrong if you think those people are managing to get an answer first try now. People's searches remain frequently incoherent. There's a reason Google's AI results frequently end with some text asking for clarification, or guessing what you actually want to do.

"knowing how to search" became useless when Google almost exclusively started returning SEO garbage. There was no longer any way to know how to search.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill.

And it was more difficult, too. You had to make critical decisions while you were working to gather the information you were after. The work had beneficial side effects.

But it also took longer. And free search got shittier. Tradeoffs.

I seem to recall headlines about Russia infecting AIs with propaganda, one or two years ago.

I don't remember actually reading the article, so I have no idea how serious that was, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't being studied actively by all major countries already. And that may be one of the core reasons for the China vs US AI competition.

Regarding the first linked article: wouldn't it be the same with no AI in sight? I suppose most people, when they'd stumbled upon a blog written by "a senior technology journalist at the BBC", would believe in the sausage eating championship too.

To be clear: I totally agree that manipulating LLMs is super-dangerous. I don't think it is a 20 minutes of work, though. It's more like "years of building credibility, and then 20 minutes of work".

"Must be fairly easy as a company to inject your specific topic there…"

Or, you know, buy their way to the top of a search engine's results.

While I still use search engines I can't fault anyone from relying on the AI features in Google, rather than the search, as that's clearly not working anymore. Unless you're looking for something rather specific you're going the get drowned in SEO spam and ads. We're back at you having to be a bit of a wizard to trick Google into finding stuff for you anymore.

I don't really like LLMs or AI assisted tools, but I think they are really good for "explain this configuration, tell me what it does, and link to the documentation". Then read the AI summary, verify with the actual docs and go from there. It's almost always the easier path to understanding, for me at least.

A black and white text interface, no ads, popups, just a best effort at answering my question is such a relief.

For younger people accessing information in this way is definitely a win.

How long until adverts are injected into LLMs?

Why? AI is a lot closer to the original way of doing things, which was to ask an expert.

The expert would then give you his thoughts on which modern books are most similar to S&S/P&P, and you would have to use your own thoughts to decide whether you agreed.

In many ways I find it similar to tutorials. You can go back and forth with the AI if there is something in the argument you want to investigate.

Then don't prompt it that way. It will do whatever you tell it to

I've spent way too many hours of my life learning to spot SEO and moving on. I'm not defending LLMs, I'm condemning search. It's shit and has been for a decade or so.

Ditto with results from Google search.

(And here I thought "Alice in Wonderland" was a Disney film—who knew it was a book first?)

Google's search AI clearly trades accuracy for speed and it shows. It frequently draws the exact opposite conclusions from the sources it references.

A quick reference shouldn't require me to have to check the quick reference for hallucinations.

> so most of it can’t really be trusted.

And yet they is not how it is used, and is trusted beyond sanity.

Not mention that this changes how information is found and how it is created.

The sometimes convenience comes alongside ejecting society from the previous system of figuring out what is true and false.

That was a system that was already failing, but we may have gotten on top of. Now we have one that is simply alien and inimical to any human scale solutions to staying ahead of it.

Generation capacity simply outstrips verification capacity, and with search summaries taking over links to the actual sites, the funding/incentives to run sites and publish content is removed.

The curtain call of the era of the open internet, and the opening act of the LLM mediated web, isn’t a show I am excited to have front row seats to.

Or degrading their keyword operators to be more mobile friendly

Google always sold ads. Google weren't always shite, though.

They, themselves, sorta proved that a good product could become dominant with ads and without being shite.

well, Selling ads in general wasn't a problem 15 years ago.

The pre-AI enshitification-part where they realized that worse search-results means more searches so more ad-revenue is another story.

If they wouldn't have done that, they could be the proof that a well-maintained search-engine is still better than a LLM.

But now this will never happen, as no-one will be willing to give up that additional search revenue while overall usage is going down...

We're just going to have to cope with the fact that AI has very nearly completed its endeavor to Mr. Frundles the entire internet.