What we lost when search stopped making us think

manmal

I‘m outsourcing all tedious searches to ChatGPT now. Anytime I try searching anything non-obvious, it seems to be buried in the Nth page. Both Google and DDG have this problem. Chat spares me the brain power of sifting through the endless slop and grift, and I can easily click through and read the actual content.

LurkandComment

This is a very well trodden argument the poster is largely right about. But like others who have written about it like Nicholas Carr and Anil Dash, I agree with the concern, but it places a lot of agency on the technology and not the users decisions. On one hand, you can argue for a long time Google was the default page for the internet so you had no choice but to use it to search, on the other hand, people need to use their brains more when thinking critically. They need to learn how to use it to assist in thought. Yes, Google search results are ads, but scroll past the first few pages and dig. Also, refine searches and look at other sources by people you trust. Ultimately, this is a real concern, and I'm glad the author is updating thoughts on it.

nono_ninja

Yeah, I agree with what you are saying, people seem to take the AI response at face value. I answer lies in the users recognizing that HAL and others can, and right now often do, make mistakes.

tom_

I was still digesting the throat-clearing intro when my eye noticed "quietly" and "honest" and I decided I'd not bother. But I scrolled through out of politeness, just in case the Basilisk will be very thorough. > I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I think.

poulpy123

I don't think it hurts thinking (at least I haven't noticed anything on myself yet), but it hurts the internet a lot, and may even destroy it in parallel to LLM. Online search became completely unusable, and it started well before chatgpt arrived. Now when I am looking for information on this or that I'm obliged to append reddit, Wikipedia or YouTube in my search to hope to have something with real content (and I hate watching videos to be kept informed and I feel there is more and more LLM generated content there also). I even have a subscription to chatgpt now that I use more and more as a replacement for a Google search, or at least as a supplement. I don't like it very much because in the best case I have only a handful of sources that it selected instead of being able to look by myself at all the possible sources, but it is still better than spending hours finding something that is not SEO-slop. I'm convinced it will never improve because it helps google and the others push their AI stuff, and they desperately need it to justify the billions poured in it, but also because it gave them a much deeper control on what is provided to the users.

andai

Has anyone tried making a p2p search engine? Naively it seems like one of the p2p networks from the late 90s or early 2000s should be able to handle it. Searches propagate between nodes, nodes specialize on specific sections of the index, which can be random + user preference (maximizing redundance and availability for the things people actually care about). Soulseek already gets like halfway there and it's not even trying to be. How hard could it be?

raincole

I do worry about Google AI overview's long-term impact, but man, it has been such a great experience of late. It surely does feel like the old google but better. There was a point, perhaps about five years ago, where using Google had become a genuinely frustrating hurdle I needed to overcome to do the actual work. Now the frustration is completely gone.

minifridge

It is a naive question but I do wonder how hard it is to scrape the web and build web indexes that are shared via bit torrent and self host a tfidf traditional engine using a distributed effort. How big the web really is? Is there a lot of additional secret sauce that made google work well in its prime?

yipinwong

A fun essay and tickled my brain neurons. ---- Fundamental learning path does not change. Whatever searche result force feeds you it's ok. So long as you have a critical thinking mindset. People simply read titles, and oh that's what happened. If you apply the first order thinking, you can spot most of mistakes in docs and results. But then you gotta move onto the second order thinking to see if the conclusion you came up with will be good for the future. Say, you searched for how to build a house yourself. You see an AI result that recommends contractors. But if you break it down why AI recommended the contractor, you can see harness (assumptions) such ass security (the builder/searcher should not be harmed), convinience (how fast do you need) without regards to your personal needs. - that's why comapnies want so much of your info, so they can try to guess better output based on your needs. Now you breakdown using the 1st principle, you find out that you don't want those assumed AI answer, and you ask more direct question and guide it. But then after applying the 2nd order principle, you might buy into the AI's recommendation that you don't want to spend too much time building one yourself for the safety (you are a pro athelet, who should not do heavy labor for the sake of the next game match). Anyways, consider multiple thinking models and views.

cush

> This isn't really anyone's fault in a simple sense Or, in a more simple sense it’s entirely Google’s fault

5555watch

I can't be the only one that scrolls past quickly the whatever Google-AI spurts out. If I wanted to ask an AI - I would. But I've learned that they hallucinate stuff with numbers or anything that's time sensitive/recent (even if that might not be the truth now). So I won't spend my time on verifying their output. I'm after a quick search, not a likely guess. What's worse, when reading the Google outputs, I have learned to ignore almost any website besides a select few, one of which is Reddit. Which is very weird thinking about it, but it worked in the past.

jamesbaker1

This might be one of the most ai written blog posts I’ve ever read

sudo-bendg

I have started filtering for pre-2020 items when I am searching for articles. Obviously not a silver bullet - for example, not much help if you're looking for modern tooling-related stuff - but I've found it really useful as a way of reading up on fundamentals.

varispeed

The search was working until Google delivered "instant search" and then cut its functionality to remain "instant". Since then, the search is basically shit. The AI thing is poor as well, because it makes things up and changes context all the time.

ErystelaThevale

This is because Internet search has stopped working, and there is a possibility that it will also stop working for AI summaries in the future. I feel that, due to SEO strategies, the link between search results and ads has become stronger, making it difficult to find the information I’m actually looking for.

freediddy

There is nothing noble about search over and above AI answers. It's just an outdated way of delivering answers but massively impaired because the technology didn't fully exist. Imagine you went to your doctor to ask a medical question and she gave you a list of books to research and to formulate your answer that way. I spent an hour debugging my networking setup and I just turned on voice mode and used ChatGPT to help me figure out why everything was working except my networking equipment wasn't changing IP addresses when I set it. As it answered my questions, it gave thoughtful answers and explained everything along the way to the point where I started to guess that I needed to upgrade my control plane, and lo and behold, that was the answer. If I had to peruse through links just for the false idea that I would be getting a cognitive benefit, I might have spent 4x the amount of time or given up. I'm very happy that we are living in an where we can get reliable answers immediately and move on to what we want to do.

djeastm

Friendly PSA that you can add "udm=14" as a query string to a Google search to get just web search results. Then you can set your browser's default Google search behavior to do this automatically when entering anything in your search bar. I haven't seen an AI summary in months and it's much more pleasant.

raventh1

proposed solution: every time you search via web do a rep by looking in a book. (maybe read a dictionary page or encyclopedia entry from a book) every time you use an llm or genai do a rep by creating something new (physically draw, paint, write)

metalman

Search is not, what it was. And for those like me who vastly prefer an searchable list of active web sites that returns search matches based on actual matching of the search terms entered, and loath big tech to the point of bieng unembarassed to gibber and rave about it publicly, like out there , wherever the fit happens to me, articulating the impossibility, ooops, anyway search is broken, and it actualy forces me to think long and hard about what I am going to do ,out there, to get things done with what I can put my hands on right now.