Old style Google search is dead, folks just haven’t closed the casket yet. My index queries are down ~90%. In the future, we’ll look back at LLMs as a major turning point in how people retrieve and consume information.

I still prefer it over using llm. And I would be doubtful that llm search has major benefits over Google search imo

Depends what you want it for.

Right now, I find each tool better at different things.

If I can only describe what I want but don't know key words, LLM are the only solution.

If I need citations, LLMs suck.

Abstractive vs. extractive search.

I think it was the switch from desktop search traffic being dominant to mobile traffic being dominant, that switch happened around the end of 2016.

Google used to prioritise big comprehensive articles on subjects for desktop users but mobile users just wanted quick answers, so that's what google prioritised as they became the biggest users.

But also, per your point, I think those smaller simpler less comprehensive posts are easier to fake/spam than the larger more compreshensible posts that came before.

Ironically, I almost never see quick answers in the top results, mostly it's dragged out pages of paragraph after paragraph with ads inbetween.

Guess who sells the ads…

Winning the war against spam is an arms race. Spam hasn’t spent years targeting AI search yet.

It's getting ridiculous. Half of the time now when I ask AI to search some information for me, it finds and summarizes some very long article obviously written by AI, and lacking any useful information.

Queries were rewritten with BERT starting even before then so it's still the same generative model problem.

I don't think this is necessarily converse to what they said.