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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

I was born in the same year that Google Search launched. Half-decent search has been here my whole life. When someone asks me "how did you learn X", the answer usually starts with "I googled it".

I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia. I've never visited a library in pursuit of a research goal. There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"!

Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me. Generative AI is a search engine killer but not in any positive sense.

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Most people have a singular image of the world.

Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, Tinder.

As if those services are the only options. No they are not.

The world isn't one dimensional nor binary. Everything is a multidimensional spectrum.

I don't use Google search and I don't have to. There are reasonable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. They aren't as good as Google was in the past, but there is also Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, Phind, StackExchange, Discord, IRC, forums, newsgroups, Claude, ChatGPT, LLama, and what not.

Sure, it would be awesome to get all the answers from a single input field, but honestly, even though Google was better in the past, this has never been the case for any sufficiently complex question.

Google has never been the only tool in my toolbelt, but it's always been the biggest and sharpest. Less so these days.

> I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia

Does that include Wikipedia? I mean, the problem with encyclopedias is that they were small (despite physically taking up entire bookcases). I didn't use them much either, even back in prehistoric times when the internet wasn't invented. They tended to disappoint by giving a crappy, superficial overview of something that was only vaguely similar to the thing you wanted to know about.

But I use wikipedia instead of doing an internet search a lot of the time. Or sometimes archive.org, for things probably in books. Cut out the middleman, go directly to where you know the information is.

For me, having an encyclopedia at home was a huge help with my studies and even finding out what I wanted to do/be later in life. This was 40+ years ago and I also had or had access to a lot of other books but never found them disappointing at all.

Huh. Maybe you studied one of the things encyclopedias tended to concentrate on? They seemed to like particular sorts of facts. Geography. Astronomy. Chemistry, to some extent. That's how I remember it, anyway. If your yen for knowledge was in tune with what the writers thought mattered, you were in luck. Even then, there were space constraints.

I don't remember their titles (they're at my parents' house), but we have several. Some generic with a few plate drawings. Some illustrated. Some focused on one subject. It was not that you learned something particular, more that you know stuff existed.

I now like the fact that they, as books, are frozen in time. And that their knowledge is well packaged and consistent. Unless you're a researcher, you don't need the latest. And as a child, the clear writings and the great illustrations was key to internalize the knowledge.

Maybe not exactly what you mean with frozen in time but they used to (or maybe still do) publish a new tome every now and then with updated information. I think they are still very useful for children, for example.

I remember them being a big help with History for example. I believe I read most of the encyclopedias I had at home (a couple of them totalling maybe 20 heavy books). Now, when I want to learn about something, say acoustics, I go to the internet, back then I would go to the encyclopedia as a starting point and later to the library for more specific information. That's how it used to be.

I meant physical encyclopedias, I use Wikipedia all the time. Although I reach ~half of those wikipedia articles via a google search query.

I'd like to recommend that you start using libraries. You'll find that they often contain vastly more information than you'll find through web search, and you're already paying for them.

> There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"! (...) Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me.

Speaking as someone who was born long before the public Internet: you can never go back to how things were before. Similarly, you can never really stay with the way things are now. The world changes. Even if you stick to the ways of your lifetime, or go back to the ways prior to your lifetime, the ways have change simply because the context has changed.

I'm not saying that we should jump the AI bandwagon. I'm just saying that we need to recognize the world is in constant flux.

Time marches onwards and people adapt, but that doesn't mean things are getting better.

Well, how are we going to search the fluxing internet?

I'm convinced people like you and me will keep using search engines, and building them if all good ones shut down.

There's a big number of things you can search for, but it's a finite number. There are certainly people interested in curating resources for their specific niche in exchange for curated resources in other niches, across the entire internet. Perhaps through a social web of trust. We need a new search engine resistant to sybil attacks. One that takes the social aspect of searching—connecting you with the relevant experts—into account.

It's a challenging problem. The whole of Web 2.0 is built on lowering scaling costs as far as possible. The trust problem is itself very big - if someone makes the modern equivalent of the Yahoo directory, how do they establish trust that they're only incentivized by site quality? If it's a graph of trust, how does one handle the subtle changes in baseline expectations and norms that qualify as "trustworthy", when moving from one part of that graph to a distant part? If such a system goes massive, how does one prevent the member nodes from being overwhelmed by requests, or even from offers to contribute by people more interested in Internet karma than giving quality contributions?

It's a tough nut to crack.

This is so interesting. I have learned more from a years’s use of chatGPT than from two decades of googling. Yeah, AI has drawbacks. But AI has never displayed an ad to me and only once displayed a cookie banner, and that’s worth quite a bit to me

Aside from the apples-to-oranges claim that a chatbots teaches you more than a search engine, it's extremely unlikely that AI will remain ad-free. Ads seem to be at a local minimum of the information economy and I don't see how chatbots would be immune to it.

> I have learned more from a years’s use of chatGPT than from two decades of googling

I simply don’t believe you. The human mind can only take in information so fast.

I have gotten great use from various AI tools but don't be naive. The "ads" are invisibly embedded in the training data and get expressed in the subtleties of the model's output. When you control the model and there's no transparency around what's in it, you can do whatever you want with the training data. This is only the beginning.

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