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Comment by hyperionultra | Hacker News Reader

Does search engines still relevant enough in LLM age? My grandma and grandpa already using cgpt voice for anything related web search. And if this demography shifting, imagine youth…

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LLM's are just summarizing search results and not always well. This is like asking if academic papers are relevant when college essays exists, imo. I would much rather read the original source of the material than the summarized (potentially badly) LLM result.

Well you could ask it to only reply with snippets from its sources.

So a slower search engine with fewer results?

Delivery food is not faster or better in a lot of places.

Delivery food is worse everywhere I've ever had it.

Compared to Claude and Gemini, I think ChatGPT is really more thorough when it comes to web searches and providing sources. The others usually answer in a short paragraph and give me maybe one or two sources, while ChatGPT thinks for a minute and presents me a little mini report with 10-20 sources to look further into. This is honestly the reason why I stopped paying for Kagi, but I'm not sure how worse this will get when ads become commonplace in ChatGPT.

Convenience is a massive leverage here. And most people trust LLM de facto. If a tool is good enough for 85% of audience - anything else is irrelevant.

One caveat is that many existing search engines are actively worse than what they had before.

Exact keyword matching had its use, but now they do some kind of vector search but without the text understanding of LLMs. Making anything more complex impossible to find without actually going to an LLM that understands what I'm actually going for and can help out.

Just recently I wanted to find out the mill build tool's special syntax to have the JVM version used for the build tool itself be the system version (on nixos, downloading a JVM won't work, but I can trivially pin a jdk version myself. Unfortunately mill will refuse to even start without this special line).

My Google/kagi fu absolutely failed, yet Claude managed to find me the exact syntax in a single prompt. (Do give it a try if you want to)

They are relevant to me, because I often look for documents rather than answers.

I think the market segmentation is:

- Seeking documents: search engine

- Seeking answers: LLM

Almost all LLM do traditional web search in the background anyway. So if you want data straight from the source without probabilistic text generation, it will be faster to do the search yourself. Like if I want to know the country of origin of a company, would type its name and go to Wikipedia. While LLM would usually search literally "What is the country of origin of ..."? and then visit LLM generated sites that SEO optimized the query on which a fraction of text is going to be relevant after which the information is very low quality.

Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.

I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.

You can do that with Kagi. Just put `?` at the end of the search and it will give you an answer.

Yes, for me.

Work: “foo corp privacy policy”, “foo okta integration”, “foo corp trust center”

Here I want specific links to exact documents because the details matter.

Home: “3d print boston terrier”, “cyberpunk fight chimera”, “!w georgia country”

Here I want to look at lots of similar things quickly, or read long-form content.

And with Kagi, “cyberpunk fight chimera?” gives me a consistently decent AI summary of the search results, with references. It’s a single UI that gives me exact results or broad summaries as requested, and that’s pretty handy.

Yes, because LLMs make stuff up all the time. Still. Anybody who's using an LLM for search isn't serious about the answers.

Kagi do have an LLM offering if that's what you still want. While still benefiting for your own search results curation and being more privacy orientated. I'm very happy that I can basically have the best of both worlds from them.

Yes, because I want actual answers, not something the LLM synthesizes which may or may not have any relation to the truth. LLMs suck for finding info if you care about the accuracy of the result (which I do).

LLMs heavily rely on traditional search engines behind the scenes.

With Kagi, anyway, search engines are very relevant to me. For my use cases, LLMs provide far inferior results in exchange for requiring more time and effort from me.

FYI, Kagi has Assistant, the chat interface that do the search and summary for you, and you can custom it, limit the search scope.

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