This really doesn’t match my experience, as Gemini was bafflingly bad at any online [re]research when I tried it 2-3 months ago. Not that google’s ai models seem particularly good at anything of late, but given the fact that google is still the king of the hill in search (even if they mostly serve you garbage, they still crawl everything) Gemini being very noticeably worse at searching things online than claude or chatgpt was a read head scratcher. I wonder how our usage patterns differ.

What do you mean by "Pi has a web search function"? Pretty sure Pi doesn't have one, except if you install some extension, but then Pi has every function.

Can you point an example? For me, recently, it had the wrong price for cable-car fare in SF, but it did show (2015) in the result. That seems reasonable to me, it's not horribly wrong. Other stuff it's been accurate on.

They're ok. But when I use a search engine it's because I want search results. If I wanted an LLM's interpretation I'd have just asked a search-enabled LLM in the first place.

have you ever done the fun trick of asking any model to adversarially review itself? highly recommended practice for anyone who trusts a one-shot output

Web search and a chatbot AI are two vastly different interfaces with different aims.

At this point, with a mature Web and a mature toolbox, I know a lot of research tools and resources that I can tap before I get out the sledgehammer of Search or LLM. So, if I know a priori that it won't work to plug a term into Wikipedia, or Wiktionary, or YouTube or something, then I can choose Gemini or Google Search.

If I go to Search, then my query means "I want to find external links and find a resource to research this term". If I go to Gemini, that means that the term is probably out of my wheelhouse, and/or I really want to delve in for some insight about this term, and I probably do not want to poke 3rd-party sites about it.

The trouble is that Google sort of melds them into the same-same, either way I choose. It wastes resources and browser-page-real-estate on that AI summary that I've got to skip and sift through the Search misses. The LLM still insists on a RAG web search and refer me to some dumb links that I didn't want.

Google was famed for its fast searches and rapid results. They used to be good results. But today it's obvious why everyone let Search products decay into garbage: because LLMs were coming, and LLMs are going to supplant your standard searches anyway.

yeah i'm genuinely baffled by this too. I read this attitude frequently and I'm tending towards the conclusion that its simply a loud minority of people. I don't know anyone who acts like this in real life.

How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit? Those are somehow so much more reliable? If you want authority it gives you links, and if you don't find good enough links you can ask it a follow up--no need to be coy--just straight up ask it for more authoritative sources and it will usually surface them. It's so blazingly fast relative to doing genuine naive search, I really don't see the downside.

> I have no idea how they are pulling that off

Google has the most AI compute by far. I don't have the link handy or I would share it.

Because Google's AIs are absolutely awful?

Because they were slow rolling them out, and heavily focused on the profitable corporate customers.

Service guarantees citizenship!

The domain business is a distraction. It was wise to sell it. They still own several gTLDs so they have plenty of revenue from this avenue.

Selling .coms and Donut's gTLDs? Peanuts.

Godaddy makes all their money from other stuff, and Google still does lots of other stuff. Google Workspace still prints money.

Lost at “AI” or some vague statement

Whose worldview is it communicating, though?

Didn’t I just see on HN the other day that it has “be humorous and irreverent” baked into its system prompt? Something like that?