7 ms·

Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "F

Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. You hear about this new programming language called "Frob", and you assume it must have a website. So you google "Frob language". You hear that there was a plane crash in DC, and assume (CNN/AP/your_favorite_news_site) has almost certainly written an article about it. You google "DC plane crash." LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient. Where LLMs will take over from search is when it comes to open-ended research - where you don't know in advance where you're going or what you're going to find. I don't really have frequent use cases of this sort, but depending on your occupation it might revolutionize your daily work.

FloorEgg 2y ago
Except when search engines bury the thing you're obviously looking for under an entire page of sponsored ads, then that convenience argument starts to not hold up as well...
- dkkergoog 2y ago
  [dead]
- krferriter 2y ago
  When I search 'dc plane crash' in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo I don't get results buried under ads. When I search 'air conditioner for sale' I do get ads at the top of each of those, but that's more okay because I am looking for things to buy. And it's easy to look past the ads to get to sites like home depot or other traditional retailers that come up not just because they purchased ad space.
  - yellowapple 2y ago
    It helps that decent ad-blockers also tend to be able to block sponsored results.
- piva00 2y ago
  Paying for ad-free search engines do exist as an alternative, sucks a lot for the ones who cannot afford such a luxury but at some point I noticed that for my life search is quite important, both personally and professionally, so I haven't minded paying for it after the free experience provided by Google, Bing, etc. started worsening.
- Rayhem 2y ago
  Except when LLM providers bury the thing you're obviously looking for under an entire page of sponsored ads (buy Diet Coke™!), then that convenience argument starts to not hold up as well...
- shpx 2y ago
  install uBlock Origin
- coryrc 2y ago
  Do you not use an ad blocker?
- ptmcc 2y ago
  If LLMs aren't already doing this, they certainly will soon. And it'll be even more insidious and "invisible" than sponsored search results.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    This is the biggest argument in favor of subscription-based funding models for search I've heard. (Kagi et al.) Ad-sponsored models are going to be dead as soon as people realize they can't trust output. And because the entire benefit to LLM search is the convenience of removing a human-in-the-loop step (scanning the search results), there won't be a clear insertion/distinction point for ads without poisoning the entire output.
    - handfuloflight 2y ago
      What if the advertiser's product or service is objectively (according to either a prompt defined by the user or by the UI operator, transparently provided) the answer to the query?
      - crabmusket 2y ago
        Then the response will also contain ads for things that are not the answer to the query. This is how search engines currently behave. Example from my work. Many of our customers will search for our company name in order to find the login page. I've watched them do this over screen share. When they do that, the top search result is an ad slot. The second search result is our login page. We buy ads against out own company name so that we can be the ad slot as well as the first result. Otherwise a competitor who buys ads against our company name could be the top slot.
        SoftTalker 2y ago
        Or a phisher could buy the ad slot or game the search results to publish a fake login page to phish credentials. This is why 2FA is not really optional anymore for anything of value.
- 0x0203 2y ago
  And most of the actual results from said search are nothing but LLM generated slop content that provide zero utility to the user and only exist to capture as many clicks and traffic as possible so they can shovel as many ads as possible. The current web is practically unusable.
deadbabe 2y ago
We’re currently in the golden age of LLMs as search engines. Eventually they’ll subtly push products and recommendations in their output to steer you toward specific things.
- HellDunkel 2y ago
  You mean like the golden age of speech recognition a couple of years ago when they claimed 80% of computer interfacing will be voice only?
  - spudlyo 2y ago
    More like as in the Golden Age of Google search, where the product optimized for returning the best, most relevant, most reputable results. As in, pre enshitification.
    - HellDunkel 2y ago
      Its already stained. And it was never golden so why care?
      - stavros 2y ago
        I assume you didn't try Google in the late 90s?
        HellDunkel 2y ago
        I did and calling it a golden age is not wrong compared to what we have now. I was referrimg to the golden age of „voice only“ here
  - II2II 2y ago
    Or it could be more like the golden age of search engines. It's hard to tell which way it will go because LLMs are a new technology. Some people see only its strengths. Some focus upon its weaknesses. What matters though is the long run, when we get over our initial reactions.
tremarley 2y ago
If you wanted to know more about a new programming language named “Frob” or a plane crash that happened today, couldn’t you use an LLM like grok? Or any other LLM that’s continuously trained on trending news?
- eddd-ddde 2y ago
  It's just a different kind of data. Even without LLMs, sometimes I want a tutorial, sometimes I want the raw API specification. For some cases I absolutely prefer an LLM, like discoverability of certain language features or toolkits. But for the details, I'll just google the documentation site (for the new terms that the LLM just taught me about) and then read the actual docs.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Search is best viewed as a black box to transform {user intention} into {desired information}. I'm hard pressed to construction an argument where, with widely-accessible LLM/LAM technology, that still looks like: 1. User types in query 2. Search returns hits 3. User selects a hit 4. User looks for information in hit 5. User has information Summarization and deep-indexing are too powerful and remove the necessity of steps 2-4. F.ex. with the API example, why doesn't your future IDE directly surface the API (from its documentation)? Or your future search directly summarize exactly the part of the API spec you need?
    - skydhash 2y ago
      I don't know the exact word for this case, but sometimes you want the surrounding information to what you're looking for. Often I skim documentations, books, articles,... not in search for a specific answer but to get the overview of what it discusses. I don't need a summary of a table of contents. But it's a very good tool for quickly locating some specific information. Something like Language Implementation Patterns (the book) |> Analyzing Languages (the part) |> Tracking and Identifying Program Symbols (the chapter) |> Resolving Symbols (the section) or Unit Testing: Principles, Practices,and Patterns (the book) |> Making your tests work for you (the part) |> Mocks and test fragility (the chapter) |> The relationship between mocks and test fragility (the section) |> Intra-system vs. inter-system communications or Python 3.13.3 Documentation (docs.python.org) |> The Python Standard Library |> Text Processing Services |> string
coldtea 2y ago
>LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient. Sounds trivial to integrate an LLM front end with a search engine backend (probably already done), and be able to type "frob language" and it gives you a curated clickable list of the top resources (language website, official tutorial, reference guide, etc) discarding spam and irrelevant search engine results in the process.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 2y ago
  That's called a search engine. We've had them for 30 years. Ahhhhhhhhhhhghh. It's blockchain all over again.
  - toyg 2y ago
    I think you mean it's SOAP all over again.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >That's called a search engine. We've had them for 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 The LLM could "intelligently" pick from the top several pages of results, discard search engine crap results and spam, summarize each link for you, and so on. We don't have that now (or for 30 years - I should know, I was there, using Yahoo!, and Altavista, and Lycos and such back in the day).
npilk 2y ago
Agreed. I think of these as two different types of searches - “page searches” where you know a page exists and want to get to it, and “content searches” where you have a more open-ended question. Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. When I search “Tom Hanks IMDB”, there’s no need to see a list of links - there’s obviously one specific page I want to visit. https://notes.npilk.com/custom-search https://notes.npilk.com/custom-search
- Y_Y 2y ago
  > Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. Are you feeling lucky?
  - npilk 2y ago
    Exactly :-) Unfortunately you can’t really show ads if you take someone directly to the destination without any interstitial content like a list of links…
    - exe34 2y ago
      wrong - that's how YouTube works. 30s advert before a video on CPR.
      - kbutler 2y ago
        I'd rather have a list of links with text ads I can ignore...
- sodality2 2y ago
  This is one of my favorite duckduckgo features - adding a single exclamation point after a search (“Tom Hanks IMDB !”) does exactly this
generalizations 2y ago
It's been pretty cool to realize that Grok 3 actually prioritizes up-to-date information: I have actually used it for both kinds of your examples, and it worked.
- exodust 2y ago
  Still use Google for quick generic lookups, spell-checks/definitions, shopping stuff, products, or things I know will return a good result. Grok is great for finding details and background info about recent news, and of course it's great for deep-diving on general knowledge topics. I also use Grok for quick coding help. I prefer to use AI for help with isolated coding aspects such as functions and methods, as a conversational reference manual. I'm not ready to sit there pretending to be the "pilot" while AI takes over my code! For the record, I do not like Google's AI generated results it spams at me when I search for things. I want AI when I choose to use AI, not when I don't choose it. Google needs a way to switch that off on the web (without being logged in).
Modified3019 2y ago
IMO an example of a good use case for an LLM, which would be otherwise very hard to search for, is clarifying vague technical concepts. Just yesterday I was trying to remember the name of a vague concept I’d forgotten, with my overall question being: “Is there a technical term in biology for the equilibrium that occurs between plant species producing defensive toxins, and toxin resistance in the insect species that feed on those plants, whereby the plant species never has enough evolutionary pressure to increase it’s toxin load enough to kill off the insect that is adapting to it” After fruitless searching around because I didn’t have the right things to look for, putting the above in ChatGPT gave an instant reply of exactly what I was looking for: “Yes, the phenomenon you're describing is often referred to as evolutionary arms race or coevolutionary arms race.”
- exe34 2y ago
  that sounds like a really great example of..... searching through vector embedding. I don't think the LLM part was technically necessary.
  - agubelu 2y ago
    It's all about the UI/UX. Same as in Dropbox/rsync
    - udev4096 2y ago
      No one who extensively uses dropbox uses their UI. It's mostly either the API or rclone. It's inefficient and a complete waste of time to use any UI at all
  - brokencode 2y ago
    Okay, so how does the average person search through vector embedding? I would like to try this out.
    - ForceBru 2y ago
      I don't think this is _literally_ a search through vector embeddings. LLMs store embeddings of individual tokens (usually parts of words), so a result of an actual search will be top-k embeddings and the corresponding tokens, similar to the output of a Google search. You could extract the initial matrix of embeddings from some open-weights model and find tokens closest to your query. However, it's not clear why do this. OP got coherent text, so that's not search. It's _similar_, though, because attention in LLMs basically looks for most similar tokens. So to answer the question about the term, the LLM had to create a stream of tokens that's semantically closest to the given description. Well, this is somewhat like a search, but it's not exactly the same.
rstuart4133 2y ago
I'd go further, and say I use search when I'm pretty confident I know the right search terms. If I don't, I'll type some wordy long explanation of what I want into an LLM and hope for the best. The reason is pretty simple. If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you side step the LLM hallucinating as it regurgitates the results it remembers on the page your would have read if you searched. If you aren't confident of the search times, it can take 1/2 an hour of dicking around with different terms, clicking though a couple of pages of search results for each set of term, until you finally figure out the lingo to use. Figuring out what you are really after from that wordy description is the inner magic of LLM's.
- jfim 2y ago
  It depends. Sometimes webpages are useful, but at the same time navigating the amount of fluff on webpages nowadays takes longer than asking a LLM. I asked Claude to give me a recipe that uses mushrooms and freezes well and it give me a decent looking soup recipe. It might not be the best soup ever, but it's soup, kinda hard to mess up. The alternative would be to get a recipe from the web with a couple dozen paragraphs about how this is the bestest soup ever and it comes from their grandma and reminds them of summer and whatnot.
  - rstuart4133 2y ago
    > I asked Claude to give me a recipe that uses mushrooms and freezes well and it give me a decent looking soup recipe. It didn't suggest adding glue? I imagine it would freeze real well if you did that. /s
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you side step the LLM hallucinating as it regurgitates the results it remembers on the page your would have read if you searched Most often not true in the kind of searches I do. Say, I search for how to do something in the Linux terminal (not just the command, but the specific options to achieve a certain thing). Google will often take me to pages that do have the answer, but are full of ads and fluff, and I have to browse through several options until I find the ones I want. ChatGPT just gives me the answer. And with any halfway decent model, hallucination only seems to be a problem in difficult or very specialized questions. Which I agree shouldn't be asked to LLMs (or not without verifying sources, at least). But over 90% of what I search aren't difficult or specialized questions, they're just things I have forgotten, or things that are easy but I don't know just because they're not in my area of expertise. For example as a learner of Chinese, I often ask it to explain sentences to me (translate the sentence, the individual words, and explain what a given word is doing in the sentence) and for that kind of thing it's basically flawless, there's no reason why it would hallucinate as such questions are trivial for a model having tons of Chinese text in its training set.
keithnz 2y ago
have you tried chatgpt search? you can do "DC plane crash" or "Frob" it will come up with links to the story, but it will quickly give you a summary with links to its sources. Best thing is you can follow up with questions.
- wavemode 2y ago
  Yes, I have. If I want something to read the page for me, then that's where LLMs come in. But what I'm talking about is when I want to read the page for myself. Waste of time to have to wait for an LLM to chew on it.
  - octernion 2y ago
    hah i use llms for that now too - "option-space 'link to <foo> lang'" and chat returns faster than the whole endeavor of opening google or putting stuff into the nav bar.
    - brookst 2y ago
      That’s my experience too. I don’t find Google or even Kagi faster for retrieving a link. All of the major LLMs can pull search results faster than I can through search websites, and then I’ve got a conversation where I can dive deeper if I want.
mr_toad 2y ago
> Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. Kind of like a manual, with an index. RTFM people.
desipenguin 2y ago
Agree 100% I tried perplexity to "search" My use case was similar to one described above. I know what I'm looking for. I just need exact URL. Perplexity miserably fails at this.
dumbfounder 2y ago
Yes they will. Why do you think they won’t? They certainly can. You just use RAG to look up the latest news based on the keywords you are using. You can use search on the back end and never surface a list of results unless the LLM decides that is a good idea. It curates that the reusits for you. Or gives you the singular site you need with context. That is better for most searches.
moralestapia 2y ago
>LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient. What? On Planet Earth, this is already a thing.
crowcroft 2y ago
Yea 'needle in a haystack' style search is something that LLM based search is simply not as good at. The reason Google is still seeing growth (in revenue etc.) is that for a lot 'commercial' search still ends with this kind of action. Take purchasing a power drill for example, you might use an LLM for some research on what drills are best, but when you're actually looking to purchase you probably just want to find the product on Home Depot/Lowe's etc.
bmcahren 2y ago
I am going to cite you in a decade. Already today ChatGPT is _far_ better than Google. Instead of finding a keyword optimized page for "frob language", I can get the objectively best sources for frob language and even find the best communities related to it. Zero frob ads, zero frob-optimized pages that are designed to trick google, etc. Traditional search is dead, semantic search through AI is alive and well. I can't yet count once AI misunderstood the meaning of my search while Google loves to make assumptions, rewrite my search query, and deliver the results that pay it the best which have the best ads (in my opinion as a lifetime user). Lets not even mention how they willingly accept misleading ads atop the results which trick the majority of common users into downloading malware and adware on the regular.
kiney 2y ago
LLMs already replaced that news example for me. Especially grok is really good at summarizing the state of reporting for current events like plane crashes
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

FloorEgg 2y ago

Except when search engines bury the thing you're obviously looking for under an entire page of sponsored ads, then that convenience argument starts to not hold up as well...

dkkergoog 2y ago
[dead]
krferriter 2y ago
When I search 'dc plane crash' in Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo I don't get results buried under ads. When I search 'air conditioner for sale' I do get ads at the top of each of those, but that's more okay because I am looking for things to buy. And it's easy to look past the ads to get to sites like home depot or other traditional retailers that come up not just because they purchased ad space.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  It helps that decent ad-blockers also tend to be able to block sponsored results.
piva00 2y ago
Paying for ad-free search engines do exist as an alternative, sucks a lot for the ones who cannot afford such a luxury but at some point I noticed that for my life search is quite important, both personally and professionally, so I haven't minded paying for it after the free experience provided by Google, Bing, etc. started worsening.
Rayhem 2y ago
Except when LLM providers bury the thing you're obviously looking for under an entire page of sponsored ads (buy Diet Coke™!), then that convenience argument starts to not hold up as well...
shpx 2y ago
install uBlock Origin
coryrc 2y ago
Do you not use an ad blocker?
ptmcc 2y ago
If LLMs aren't already doing this, they certainly will soon. And it'll be even more insidious and "invisible" than sponsored search results.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  This is the biggest argument in favor of subscription-based funding models for search I've heard. (Kagi et al.) Ad-sponsored models are going to be dead as soon as people realize they can't trust output. And because the entire benefit to LLM search is the convenience of removing a human-in-the-loop step (scanning the search results), there won't be a clear insertion/distinction point for ads without poisoning the entire output.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    What if the advertiser's product or service is objectively (according to either a prompt defined by the user or by the UI operator, transparently provided) the answer to the query?
    - crabmusket 2y ago
      Then the response will also contain ads for things that are not the answer to the query. This is how search engines currently behave. Example from my work. Many of our customers will search for our company name in order to find the login page. I've watched them do this over screen share. When they do that, the top search result is an ad slot. The second search result is our login page. We buy ads against out own company name so that we can be the ad slot as well as the first result. Otherwise a competitor who buys ads against our company name could be the top slot.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Or a phisher could buy the ad slot or game the search results to publish a fake login page to phish credentials. This is why 2FA is not really optional anymore for anything of value.
0x0203 2y ago
And most of the actual results from said search are nothing but LLM generated slop content that provide zero utility to the user and only exist to capture as many clicks and traffic as possible so they can shovel as many ads as possible. The current web is practically unusable.

deadbabe 2y ago

We’re currently in the golden age of LLMs as search engines. Eventually they’ll subtly push products and recommendations in their output to steer you toward specific things.

HellDunkel 2y ago
You mean like the golden age of speech recognition a couple of years ago when they claimed 80% of computer interfacing will be voice only?
- spudlyo 2y ago
  More like as in the Golden Age of Google search, where the product optimized for returning the best, most relevant, most reputable results. As in, pre enshitification.
  - HellDunkel 2y ago
    Its already stained. And it was never golden so why care?
    - stavros 2y ago
      I assume you didn't try Google in the late 90s?
      - HellDunkel 2y ago
        I did and calling it a golden age is not wrong compared to what we have now. I was referrimg to the golden age of „voice only“ here
- II2II 2y ago
  Or it could be more like the golden age of search engines. It's hard to tell which way it will go because LLMs are a new technology. Some people see only its strengths. Some focus upon its weaknesses. What matters though is the long run, when we get over our initial reactions.

tremarley 2y ago

If you wanted to know more about a new programming language named “Frob” or a plane crash that happened today, couldn’t you use an LLM like grok? Or any other LLM that’s continuously trained on trending news?

eddd-ddde 2y ago
It's just a different kind of data. Even without LLMs, sometimes I want a tutorial, sometimes I want the raw API specification. For some cases I absolutely prefer an LLM, like discoverability of certain language features or toolkits. But for the details, I'll just google the documentation site (for the new terms that the LLM just taught me about) and then read the actual docs.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Search is best viewed as a black box to transform {user intention} into {desired information}. I'm hard pressed to construction an argument where, with widely-accessible LLM/LAM technology, that still looks like: 1. User types in query 2. Search returns hits 3. User selects a hit 4. User looks for information in hit 5. User has information Summarization and deep-indexing are too powerful and remove the necessity of steps 2-4. F.ex. with the API example, why doesn't your future IDE directly surface the API (from its documentation)? Or your future search directly summarize exactly the part of the API spec you need?
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I don't know the exact word for this case, but sometimes you want the surrounding information to what you're looking for. Often I skim documentations, books, articles,... not in search for a specific answer but to get the overview of what it discusses. I don't need a summary of a table of contents. But it's a very good tool for quickly locating some specific information. Something like Language Implementation Patterns (the book) |> Analyzing Languages (the part) |> Tracking and Identifying Program Symbols (the chapter) |> Resolving Symbols (the section) or Unit Testing: Principles, Practices,and Patterns (the book) |> Making your tests work for you (the part) |> Mocks and test fragility (the chapter) |> The relationship between mocks and test fragility (the section) |> Intra-system vs. inter-system communications or Python 3.13.3 Documentation (docs.python.org) |> The Python Standard Library |> Text Processing Services |> string

coldtea 2y ago

>LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient. Sounds trivial to integrate an LLM front end with a search engine backend (probably already done), and be able to type "frob language" and it gives you a curated clickable list of the top resources (language website, official tutorial, reference guide, etc) discarding spam and irrelevant search engine results in the process.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
coldpie 2y ago
That's called a search engine. We've had them for 30 years. Ahhhhhhhhhhhghh. It's blockchain all over again.
- toyg 2y ago
  I think you mean it's SOAP all over again.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >That's called a search engine. We've had them for 30 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 The LLM could "intelligently" pick from the top several pages of results, discard search engine crap results and spam, summarize each link for you, and so on. We don't have that now (or for 30 years - I should know, I was there, using Yahoo!, and Altavista, and Lycos and such back in the day).

npilk 2y ago

Agreed. I think of these as two different types of searches - “page searches” where you know a page exists and want to get to it, and “content searches” where you have a more open-ended question. Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. When I search “Tom Hanks IMDB”, there’s no need to see a list of links - there’s obviously one specific page I want to visit. https://notes.npilk.com/custom-search https://notes.npilk.com/custom-search

Y_Y 2y ago
> Really, for many “page searches”, a good search engine should just be able to take you immediately to the page. Are you feeling lucky?
- npilk 2y ago
  Exactly :-) Unfortunately you can’t really show ads if you take someone directly to the destination without any interstitial content like a list of links…
  - exe34 2y ago
    wrong - that's how YouTube works. 30s advert before a video on CPR.
    - kbutler 2y ago
      I'd rather have a list of links with text ads I can ignore...
sodality2 2y ago
This is one of my favorite duckduckgo features - adding a single exclamation point after a search (“Tom Hanks IMDB !”) does exactly this

generalizations 2y ago

It's been pretty cool to realize that Grok 3 actually prioritizes up-to-date information: I have actually used it for both kinds of your examples, and it worked.

exodust 2y ago
Still use Google for quick generic lookups, spell-checks/definitions, shopping stuff, products, or things I know will return a good result. Grok is great for finding details and background info about recent news, and of course it's great for deep-diving on general knowledge topics. I also use Grok for quick coding help. I prefer to use AI for help with isolated coding aspects such as functions and methods, as a conversational reference manual. I'm not ready to sit there pretending to be the "pilot" while AI takes over my code! For the record, I do not like Google's AI generated results it spams at me when I search for things. I want AI when I choose to use AI, not when I don't choose it. Google needs a way to switch that off on the web (without being logged in).

Modified3019 2y ago

IMO an example of a good use case for an LLM, which would be otherwise very hard to search for, is clarifying vague technical concepts. Just yesterday I was trying to remember the name of a vague concept I’d forgotten, with my overall question being: “Is there a technical term in biology for the equilibrium that occurs between plant species producing defensive toxins, and toxin resistance in the insect species that feed on those plants, whereby the plant species never has enough evolutionary pressure to increase it’s toxin load enough to kill off the insect that is adapting to it” After fruitless searching around because I didn’t have the right things to look for, putting the above in ChatGPT gave an instant reply of exactly what I was looking for: “Yes, the phenomenon you're describing is often referred to as evolutionary arms race or coevolutionary arms race.”

exe34 2y ago
that sounds like a really great example of..... searching through vector embedding. I don't think the LLM part was technically necessary.
- agubelu 2y ago
  It's all about the UI/UX. Same as in Dropbox/rsync
  - udev4096 2y ago
    No one who extensively uses dropbox uses their UI. It's mostly either the API or rclone. It's inefficient and a complete waste of time to use any UI at all
- brokencode 2y ago
  Okay, so how does the average person search through vector embedding? I would like to try this out.
  - ForceBru 2y ago
    I don't think this is _literally_ a search through vector embeddings. LLMs store embeddings of individual tokens (usually parts of words), so a result of an actual search will be top-k embeddings and the corresponding tokens, similar to the output of a Google search. You could extract the initial matrix of embeddings from some open-weights model and find tokens closest to your query. However, it's not clear why do this. OP got coherent text, so that's not search. It's _similar_, though, because attention in LLMs basically looks for most similar tokens. So to answer the question about the term, the LLM had to create a stream of tokens that's semantically closest to the given description. Well, this is somewhat like a search, but it's not exactly the same.

rstuart4133 2y ago

I'd go further, and say I use search when I'm pretty confident I know the right search terms. If I don't, I'll type some wordy long explanation of what I want into an LLM and hope for the best. The reason is pretty simple. If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you side step the LLM hallucinating as it regurgitates the results it remembers on the page your would have read if you searched. If you aren't confident of the search times, it can take 1/2 an hour of dicking around with different terms, clicking though a couple of pages of search results for each set of term, until you finally figure out the lingo to use. Figuring out what you are really after from that wordy description is the inner magic of LLM's.

jfim 2y ago
It depends. Sometimes webpages are useful, but at the same time navigating the amount of fluff on webpages nowadays takes longer than asking a LLM. I asked Claude to give me a recipe that uses mushrooms and freezes well and it give me a decent looking soup recipe. It might not be the best soup ever, but it's soup, kinda hard to mess up. The alternative would be to get a recipe from the web with a couple dozen paragraphs about how this is the bestest soup ever and it comes from their grandma and reminds them of summer and whatnot.
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  > I asked Claude to give me a recipe that uses mushrooms and freezes well and it give me a decent looking soup recipe. It didn't suggest adding glue? I imagine it would freeze real well if you did that. /s
Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you side step the LLM hallucinating as it regurgitates the results it remembers on the page your would have read if you searched Most often not true in the kind of searches I do. Say, I search for how to do something in the Linux terminal (not just the command, but the specific options to achieve a certain thing). Google will often take me to pages that do have the answer, but are full of ads and fluff, and I have to browse through several options until I find the ones I want. ChatGPT just gives me the answer. And with any halfway decent model, hallucination only seems to be a problem in difficult or very specialized questions. Which I agree shouldn't be asked to LLMs (or not without verifying sources, at least). But over 90% of what I search aren't difficult or specialized questions, they're just things I have forgotten, or things that are easy but I don't know just because they're not in my area of expertise. For example as a learner of Chinese, I often ask it to explain sentences to me (translate the sentence, the individual words, and explain what a given word is doing in the sentence) and for that kind of thing it's basically flawless, there's no reason why it would hallucinate as such questions are trivial for a model having tons of Chinese text in its training set.

keithnz 2y ago

have you tried chatgpt search? you can do "DC plane crash" or "Frob" it will come up with links to the story, but it will quickly give you a summary with links to its sources. Best thing is you can follow up with questions.

wavemode 2y ago
Yes, I have. If I want something to read the page for me, then that's where LLMs come in. But what I'm talking about is when I want to read the page for myself. Waste of time to have to wait for an LLM to chew on it.
- octernion 2y ago
  hah i use llms for that now too - "option-space 'link to <foo> lang'" and chat returns faster than the whole endeavor of opening google or putting stuff into the nav bar.
  - brookst 2y ago
    That’s my experience too. I don’t find Google or even Kagi faster for retrieving a link. All of the major LLMs can pull search results faster than I can through search websites, and then I’ve got a conversation where I can dive deeper if I want.

mr_toad 2y ago

> Search is primarily a portal - you know a particular resource exists, you just don't know its exact URL. Kind of like a manual, with an index. RTFM people.

desipenguin 2y ago

Agree 100% I tried perplexity to "search" My use case was similar to one described above. I know what I'm looking for. I just need exact URL. Perplexity miserably fails at this.

dumbfounder 2y ago

Yes they will. Why do you think they won’t? They certainly can. You just use RAG to look up the latest news based on the keywords you are using. You can use search on the back end and never surface a list of results unless the LLM decides that is a good idea. It curates that the reusits for you. Or gives you the singular site you need with context. That is better for most searches.

moralestapia 2y ago

>LLMs aren't ever going to replace search for that use case, simply because they're never going to be as convenient. What? On Planet Earth, this is already a thing.

crowcroft 2y ago

Yea 'needle in a haystack' style search is something that LLM based search is simply not as good at. The reason Google is still seeing growth (in revenue etc.) is that for a lot 'commercial' search still ends with this kind of action. Take purchasing a power drill for example, you might use an LLM for some research on what drills are best, but when you're actually looking to purchase you probably just want to find the product on Home Depot/Lowe's etc.

bmcahren 2y ago

I am going to cite you in a decade. Already today ChatGPT is _far_ better than Google. Instead of finding a keyword optimized page for "frob language", I can get the objectively best sources for frob language and even find the best communities related to it. Zero frob ads, zero frob-optimized pages that are designed to trick google, etc. Traditional search is dead, semantic search through AI is alive and well. I can't yet count once AI misunderstood the meaning of my search while Google loves to make assumptions, rewrite my search query, and deliver the results that pay it the best which have the best ads (in my opinion as a lifetime user). Lets not even mention how they willingly accept misleading ads atop the results which trick the majority of common users into downloading malware and adware on the regular.

kiney 2y ago

LLMs already replaced that news example for me. Especially grok is really good at summarizing the state of reporting for current events like plane crashes

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