Hacker News

points by j45 13 hours ago | 0 comments

AI can definitely be a more natural experience for search, but it doesn't return better search results.

> but it doesn't return better search results.

It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.

[–] WarmWash 13 hours ago

Google makes a search engine for regular people. It used to make a search engine for engineers, but it has mostly killed that style of searching off.

"News oil prices trump iran" became "Why is gas 20 cents more today? Did something happen with Trump and Iran talks?"

This change even predates LLMs. Regular people were constantly sending queries like that 10+ years ago.

[–] j45 13 hours ago

It seems this way - however, it's not.

Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).

AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.

We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.

The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.

[–] addaon 12 hours ago

> Google's organic search results are ranked by quality

What does this even mean? They're ranked by metrics that are assumed to be a proxy for quality, but (a) the accuracy of those proxies varies widely and (b) the ranks are relative; if a result is no longer in the response pool the fact that it would have been higher quality is invisible. Consider the year where anyone who's profile had been tagged as a software developer couldn't find any information on tost rings for sailplane towing because the "autocorrection" to toString was so strong that no mechanism besides logging out gave any relevant results; there's always crap like this going on.

[–] ge96 13 hours ago

I have started to use the interactive Google summary chat, it's nice to have that initial search result context to follow up on with more questions

[–] j45 13 hours ago

Google's AI search is different because they have the history of what right, and quality looks like, it's not just the most common webpages.

[–] darepublic 13 hours ago

When I'm looking for info that requires careful parsing of a source site, then LLM is faster. If it's something like looking up the hours of a business googling that local business is better imo. Result is fast you get to see the business picture etc

[–] j45 13 hours ago

Search is not analysis like you're describing.

[–] cnity 13 hours ago

Search has moved on from tf.idf + pagerank at this point. And absolutely they do use things like encoders to produce embeddings that are used in retrieval.

[–] j45 13 hours ago

It's not about whether it moves on or not.

Google ranked the best results, not the most commonly occurring ones.

AI is by default returning the highest statistical percentage of what it thinks you are looking for in a response, which may or may not be a search result.

A fun example is having the AI run a search, and comparing it to perplexity, or even gemini a little. OpenAI is improving, and Claude is pretty consistently not made for comprehensive search.

[–] JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago

Google search results are crap enough that someone only comparing them to various AIs may find the latter more natural.

[–] spwa4 13 hours ago

Yep, that's it. Search results are just such a bad example. AI just convinces you -falsely- it's results are good, but they suck.

[–] j45 13 hours ago

It may or may. not try to convince anything.

Often when we use a search engine, we're trying to piece together something that might be across multiple links, or a single link

[–] spwa4 10 hours ago

Nope. AI has no idea and no complete picture and just acts like it does. Search engines at least give you everything they have.