They can be good for search, but you *must* click through the provided links and...

bloppe · 2025-10-22T15:04:10

The problem is that 90% of people will not do that once they've satisfied their confirmation bias. Hard to say if that's going to be better or worse than the current echo chamber effects of the Internet. I'm still holding out for better, but certainly this is shaking that assumption

hunterpayne · 2025-10-22T20:29:44

So this probably is valid. However, so is Gell-Mann amnesia and both phenomena happen a lot. There are topics where one side is the group of people who have attempted to understand a problem and the other side are people who either do not or won't due to emotions. Acting as if it is all confirmation bias feels good but probably isn't the best way to look at the media.

reaperducer · 2025-10-22T15:13:57

They can be good for search, but you must click through the provided links and verify that they actually say what it says they do.

Then they're not very good at search.

It's like saying the proverbial million monkeys at typewriters are good at search because eventually they type something right.

wat10000 · 2025-10-22T16:14:44

Huh? All the classic search engines required you to click through the results and read them. There's nothing wrong with that. What's different is that LLMs will give you a summary that might make you think you can get away with not clicking through anymore. This is a mistake. But that doesn't mean that the search itself is bad. I've had plenty of cases where an LLM gave me incorrect summaries of search results, and plenty of cases where it found stuff I had a hard time finding on my own because it was better at figuring out what to search for.