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Comment by yoavm | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting — "knowing how to search" used to be a skill. One wouldn't search for "How did Cantor come up with his diagonal proof?", but rather "cantor diagonal proof origin". You would see "normies" searching and wanted to bang your head against the wall seeing them searching like they're talking.

But seems like they won? Why know how to search when you can simply ask your question. You can even tyipe it layke dat and it would still work.

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But today neither of your search phrases will give any useful results on google search, while LLMs get it right once in a while.

This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.

But seeing disney+ now go all ads for all tiers just shows that's the way they arc bends. Eventually AI will take over and when it does, it will then turn into the shittiest shit ad-infused service the world has ever known.

> This is under-appreciated part of it. Search had been deliberately degraded for some time now as part of the usual enshittification arc. Where as AI is still in the early part of the arc where its trying to do better, so the difference between them seems even bigger.

That's how AI will surpass us. Once we enshittify humans sufficiently, AI will flourish. That's why I support extensive AI use in school classrooms, the younger the better, it's the best policy for OpenAI and Anthropic investors.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill

I would argue this was always a bit silly, and mostly due to UI shortcomings of search platforms. The fact you needed to add "magic" params to shape the results speaks volumes. Any UI that fundamentally tries to reshape how you are expect to interact, or impose certain "behavior" is wrong. This is also why we are using touch instead of a stylus.

AI won because they took the paradigm of presenting a new way of doing something in a familiar way. An LLM works very similarly how you would ask a knowledgeable friend, and google worked similarly how an engineer would query a database.

Phrasing it as a UI shortcoming is underselling it. The search mechanism itself was dumb[1] and therefore the user had to be more intelligent. As an example, knowing synonyms for what you were searching for, in order to disambiguate the query from a more popular term that would likely dominate the results but was irrelevant for you, was a major skill.

[1] Yes, we can argue that LLMs are dumb, also. But they magically do "get" your intent with your prompt, unlike the search engines of yesteryear.

Nothing has changed, though. In my office the ones that have really boosted productivity are the ones putting in the effort to craft solid prompts and understand when to move that slider on reasoning effort and model selection. Or understand and put thought into how to leverage the tool, like project folders with the context to all or part of your job the model can reference. Everyone else throws a lazy prompt at the default 'instant' model, gets a crap response and then they give up.

You're absolutely wrong if you think those people are managing to get an answer first try now. People's searches remain frequently incoherent. There's a reason Google's AI results frequently end with some text asking for clarification, or guessing what you actually want to do.

"knowing how to search" became useless when Google almost exclusively started returning SEO garbage. There was no longer any way to know how to search.

I'm surprised google didn't return stuff about Cantor-Fitzgerald losing hundreds of employees on 9/11, considering it's the 25th anniversary.

I remember wanting to look up something about the Andrew Niccol/Nicolas Cage movie "Lord of War", during the time the game "God of War" was getting all the hype. Guess which word Google assumed I got wrong, and what all the results were all about.

It wasn't a worthwhile skill anyways.

Finding the right words to please the currently popular search engine is not a skill that easily translate elsewhere. It is not like programming where precision is key, searching has always been a bit fuzzy. Fact checking, crossing information, understanding primary sources, etc... these are real skills, typing words in a search engine is meh.

That we now have language models that allow let machines capture the intent of the query without the need for special incantations is a clear win to me.

Where LLMs are really excellent compared to search engines is when you don't really know what you want. You don't need to know about "Cantor diagonal proof", you just need to know "That math thing where you trace a diagonal across decimal numbers", and the LLM will immediately tell you about Cantor.

> "knowing how to search" used to be a skill.

And it was more difficult, too. You had to make critical decisions while you were working to gather the information you were after. The work had beneficial side effects.

But it also took longer. And free search got shittier. Tradeoffs.

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