As LLMs become the go-to for quick answers, fewer people are posting questions on forums or social media. This shift could make online searches less fruitful in the future, with fewer discussions and solutions available publicly. Imagine troubleshooting a tech issue and finding nothing online because everyone else asked an LLM instead. You do the same, but the LLM only knows the manual, offering no further help. Stuck, you contact tech support, wait weeks for a reply, and the cycle continues—no new training data for LLMs or new pages for search engines to index. Could this lead to a future where both search results and LLMs are less effective?
No, because I ignore whatever AI slop comes up when I search for something
I have never found it to be anything other than useless. I will actively search for a qualified answer to my questions, rather than being lazy and relying on the first thing that pops up
To be fair, at the current state search engines work LLMs might not be the worst idea.
I’m looking for the 7800x3d, not 3D shooters, not the 1234x3d, no not the pentium 4, not the 4700rtx. It takes more and more effort to search something, and the first pages show every piece of crap I’m not interested in.
Google made the huge mistake of placing the CEO of adds in charge of search.
And now it fucking sucks.
The current state of search engines is at least partially because the search engine owners have been trying to shove AI down the users’ throats already. Saying “go full LLM” is like saying “hmm, it’s hot in this pan, maybe it’s better to be in the fire underneath”.
The other, perhaps more important, part of search engine corruption is from trying to shove advertising down users’ throats. LLM in search will be twisted into doing the same thing, so that won’t save it either.
The, other, other part is the fact that an increasing percentage of the Internet is made up of walled gardens and web apps that are all but impossible to index, and LLMs can’t help there. Pigboys that run the hard-to-index sites selling the content out from under the users notwithstanding.
Finally, as has been pointed out elsewhere, an LLM can only give an answer based on what was correct yesterday. Or last week. Or a decade ago. Even forums have this problem. Take the fact that unchangeable, “irreplaceable” answers on sites like StackOverflow reflect the state of things when the answers were written, not how things are now, years later.
What I’m worried about are traditional indexers being intentionally nerfed, discontinued, or left unmaintained at best. I’ve often wondered what it would take to self host a personal indexer. I remember a time when search giant Alta Vista had a full text index of the then known internet on their DEC Alpha server(s).
Alta Vista was great!
Now I’m definitely showing my age…
The problem lies with the way the “modern” internet works by loading everything dynamically. Static pages to index are becoming more rare. Also a lot of information is being “lost” in proprietary systems like discord. Those also can’t be indexed (easily)
I think you will be in a loud minority, people don’t like additional work.
Probably
But I don’t see it as work
“Work” is unfucking a situation that I created by being lazy in the first place rather than doing something properly
I’m probably showing my age though…
Even “let me Google that for you” was popular only some years ago. Yes, people are lazy, unthinking hedonists most of the time. In the absence of some sort of strict moral basis, society degenerates because only the tiniest minority will even think about things to try to establish some personal rules.
I still use https://lmgtfy.com/ as a public shame for anyone that can’t be arsed to put in a bit of effort to find something.
You only ignore AI slop when you recognize it as such.
I specifically ignore the google “AI summary”
I also tend to go through the results until I get something from a qualified source.
I’m sure I’m getting some of the aforementioned AI slop, but I would wager that I’m getting better results than the people I know who specifically look for an AI summary.