You definitely would not want the existing SEO enhanced search results. And definitely not the not-too-distant future of SEO enhanced, AI poisoned listings where every eating place proudly declares itself "most likely/probably the best burger joint".

We need to go back to a more innocent time when we could ask a select group of friends and their trusted chain of friends for recommendations. Not what social media is today.

I don't have friends all over the country, and I submit that, if the adage "150 people" is true, no one has friends "all over the country".

I dislike driving through Texas, and so, most road trips involve McDonalds - the only time I eat the junk.

My car's inbuilt nav is 13 years out of date, so it knows major throughways but not, for instance, that the road I live on has its own interface to the "highway", and so on, up to restaurants. Phones are unreliable in a lot of the US, and at one point I had a spare phone with all of its storage dedicated to offline Google maps just so I wouldn't get stuck in the Rockies somewhere.

Microsoft used to sell trip planning software and those were the good old days.

I'm on a road trip across Utah and Colorado right now and I've been experimenting with both Gemini and OpenAI Deep Research for this kind of thing with surprisingly decent results. Here's one transcript from this morning: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e9f968-4e88-8006-b672-13381d5e95...

I'm curious what the problem is with that task. I'd open Google maps, find a larger place in the right direction, confirm with directions that it's about 2h away, search for "dinner/lunch/restaurant/Japanese/tacos/..." in the visible area, choose something highly rated. I've done that lots of times successfully. What part is that fails for you? (As a non-driver of course)

The problem is choice. I don't care about Japanese/tacos - either would be fine, but Argentine would be better (I have no idea if it is even a thing, but if it is I want to try it). I don't want a chain (well maybe a local chain) - I have plenty of McDonald's near my house if I want that, I want something I can't get near home. Maps will put right at top all the big chains that pay for that top spot and I need to scroll through them. More than once I've seen something that might be interesting but then the map scrolls/resizes and I can't find it anymore.

But you're taking as a given that the AI is going to have any better idea than Google Maps, or be subject to less interference from marketing/paid placement stuff, when like... I'd be willing to bet a small amount of money that it's going to do what you're decrying: it's going to search $localized_area for "restaurant" and if you're lucky, maybe add -chain to it. What you want here are locals notions of what's good and not, and while I absolutely respect the shit out of that (and would love it myself!) I don't really know how to facilitate that at scale without immediately caving to the same negative influences that are screwing it up right now.

Like, really what you're wanting is legitimate information not bound to the whims of advertisers and marketers (and again, to be clear, don't we fucking all) but I don't think an LLM is going to do that for you. If it does it now, and that's a load-bearing if, I have a strong feeling that's because this tech, like all tech, is in it's infancy stage. It hasn't yet gotten enough attention from corporations and their slimy marketing divisions, but that's a temporary state of affairs and has been for every past tech too. Like, OpenAI just closed another funding round and it's valuation is now THREE HUNDRED BILLION. Do you REALLY think they and by extension/as a result, their competitors, are going to be thinking about editorial independence when existing established information institutions already can't?