Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Search is still better for getting to specific, existing documents you need. Even the RAG people have been finding that out with hybrid models becoming more popular over time. I also think you can update search indexes more cheaply than further pretraining LLM’s.

View on HN

Not to mention that the cost per search in terms of compute and energy is so much smaller for web search than for running an LLM. I forget the exact numbers now, but it was orders of magnitude as I recall.

Search engines are just cheaper to run. I don't know that there's a good, long term model for a free LLM-based search replacement because of how much higher the operating costs are, ad supported or not.

On top of that, search usually uses CPU instead of GPU. A large infrastructure with CPU’s is easier to reuse for jobs other than search.

These are great reasons why this business will be hard, but given how ChatGPT and Perplexity are making inroads into search traffic, you can't deny it's an experience consumers prefer.

I agree that there’s interest in it. I found ChatGPT and AI search very convenient in some situations where I used them. Other times they hallucinated. I have no idea, though, what customers prefer until I see large-scale surveys by companies not pushing A.I..

It could also become a differentiator allowing multiple suppliers. On one hand, you have people doing search for quality results. Other search engines include the AI results. The user could choose between them on a job by job basis or the search provider might, like !G in DDG, allow 3rd-party AI search as an option.

The bigger problem I have is with scale for the dollar. Search companies with their own indexes already mostly failed. There’s a few using Bing. It’s down to just three or four with their own index. Massive consolidation of power. If GPU’s and AI search cost massively more, wouldn’t that problem further increase?

This is a great point, but I wonder how much of that kind of search intent is part of google's traffic. If that becomes the only reason people use Google I wonder if they'll go the way of Yahoo. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but there was a time when Yahoo's dominance seemed unquestionable (I'm old).

To be clear, I'm not arguing for everything should be part of a pretrained LLM, but the experience of knowledge searching that ChatGPT and Perplexity provide are pretty superior to Google today (when they work).

I’ll add that I used to love Yahoo Directory. I couldn’t imagine it doing anything but grow. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com