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Comment by hidelooktropic | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, I don't see why the abundance of pages that come up in searches these days with a paragraph of text and a long scroll of ads are doing any better than the generalizations LLMs are trained to make.

I think it's also worth pointing out the more advanced LLMs are exceptionally accurate (despite being imperfect and not without bias) and highly available. That's not a peg below your average search result.

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Well, it's really easy to see. When I you search on Google, and go on, say, stackoverflow or medium, you get a ton of context: - rank of the page - name of the website where it's posted - date of the post - context of the post (comments, replies...)

All this context refines your result, because you know what you interact with. ChatGPT obfuscates all this, and on top of that introduces hallucinations.

For a more explicit example when looking for a code snippet, I can ask ChatGPT to give me the answer, but I more often search for the answer in stackoverflow because I can see if the top answer is from 2016 and probably outdated, and I can see if the top answer has a lot of criticism or praises. chatGPT could just regurgitate the medium post of a junior with bad practices and you'd have no clue about that.

Sometimes, only sometimes, search engines direct you to a trustworthy, citable resource. LLMs are never a citable resource and usually mangle URLs.

It's not that I trust randos on reddit, it's that even when they're wrong, I can link someone to the same bad advice and it doesn't change on me, for the most part.

Because search engines give you results you can look through. LLMs just make up garbage and pretend its true.

You can use the bing copilot if you want your LLM to use references.

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