[cko]

In the past two years most of my Google searches were: "______ vs ______", <product name> review, and <subject> reddit.

Sometime in the last two months I noticed myself going straight to ChatGPT, and Gemini flash when my free credits ran out. And ocasionally some Reddit threads.

[chrismorgan]

And then the question is: why? Is it because the LLM is better, or because the search engine is worse?

I just purchased a monitor, from among the cheaper 4K 27" ones I could find. I’m in India, so they may not be the same models you’d get in places like the USA: maybe the situation is better there. When trying to compare them, or even find reviews of them, I could not find anything useful through a search engine. Exactly zero useful things. Not a single review of my four candidates. Oh, a couple of video “reviews” probably in Hindi… but I have learned to utterly scorn that category as consistently devoid of content; and a couple of “review” sites… with only copies of the first-party marketing material.

This part of the web seems to be just dead.

As for LLMs, well, I’m sceptical that they actually are all that much better: where is the information coming from? I’m deeply suspicious that they just look better. It’s well-established that they’re magnificent at conning.

For my own experience, I’ve tried DuckDuckGo’s Assist a few times, which is GPT-4o, and I haven’t been impressed with it. Almost everything it comes up with is superficial, or wrong.

[Ferret7446]

Because the search engine is worse, obviously. A search engine can only find things that exist, so unless someone wrote an article that was exactly what you need, you'll have to find multiple sources and compile the info yourself. LLMs do all of that work and generate the ideal report you were looking for (minus hallucinations).

[nottorp]

Product reviews have been dead before "AI".

Even if you search for english reviews.

I don't think "AI" will help at all with this since it's trained on the same polluted space.