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Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

For me, it seems the direction for search is going towards AI sites. (Gemini, ChatGPT)

Trying to reinvent Google/ Search in 2024 seems a bit like jumping the shark

Quite the opposite. The part of the crowd that has site:old.reddit.com in their muscle memory has to be the premium end of the search market.

Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something better.

The audacity of power users assuming they're the majority

Parent comment makes no assumption that they are the majority. But a minority of users (probably hacker types) who search with boolean operators and keywords instead of typing full sentences do indeed represent a portion of the market willing to pay $$$. These users crave a search engine which returns what they searched for, not what the provider's black box algorithm comes up with.

GNU/Linux as a desktop OS is an example of this market. 95%+ of people will work with Windows or MacOS their whole career which fits their use case perfectly. But the 5% of powerusers who choose Linux gain so much productivity and professional value that it's a thriving ecosystem with plenty of lucrative businesses built around it.

I agree, and I think it's half and half for me. Many times when I search, my query ends with a question mark. They're questions, looking for a simple answer. Those are the searches I have been going to LLMs for more and more lately. As the LLMs get better and hallucinate less, this is becoming more and more viable. Other searches are looking for a page. Where to buy a particular component. Where to download a particular library. Things like that. For that, Google is still useful. The thing is, I think the first kind of search makes up a huge amount of Google's business. I would hazard a guess that it actually makes up more than half of their search traffic, and the loss of that kind of query is going to seriously damage them. There's also nothing stopping LLMs from eventually giving us answers to the second kind of query either, as they start being able to ingest and incorporate real time data. To me, it seems inevitable that LLMs will kill Google's main source of revenue (search is 57%) and eventually their entire company, as much of the rest of what they do is subsidized by search. They may be too large at this point to adjust to this extinction-level change to the environment.

I would argue that answer seeking queries have lower commercial value, compared to queries about products or services.

Completely agree. Search engines are dead to me.

For general information like recipes, tech stuff, how-to's, etc LLMs blow search engine results out of the water. Even the local/contextual content is better. The new maps feature in ChatGPT is amazing.

The only case where a search engine beats an LLM for me is when I'm looking for a site where the site itself provides a bespoke experience like shopping, where the engine provides a quicker path to the url I don't yet have in my browser history, like "<Some band> Tour" -> somebandofficial.com

I want to remake Yahoo!

I want to browse a catalog of interesting web content.

Like walking down the isle of an old fashioned newsagent, flicking through the magazines that stand out.

The thing is, often I want articles, opinion pieces, and interesting reading. Sure, sometimes I'm searching for facts or answers to programming questions, but most of the time LLMs are not going to give me what I'm looking for.

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