Chat bots for search

tl;dr

IMHO, chat bots for search is a really bad idea. In fact, I think it kills the miracle that the internet is.

why

Today I saw this tweet on X  and it affirmed by belief that chat bots using LLM to search the internet are a really bad idea.

Here's why ?

For all their faults, traditional search engines like Google , Bing, DuckDuckGo  are fountains of wealth for the internet.  We see manipulative tactics used to improve search rankings, which can degrade the search experience, but these issues are more a reflection of search engines and their algorithms for reordering results rather than a need of a new paradigm to search. The more I think about it,  those familiar blue links as search results are very important.

IMHO, search pre chat bots provided an opportunity for anyone anywhere to participate in the internet economy. It helped a human or an organization with a unique point of view or product offering to build a website, share their opinion and have a chance to be discovered by a search engine.

I have seen websites and go wow and sometimes why, but each website has the potential to have the personality of their creators and I genuinely feel companies trying to  build search engines should look to make websites with unique perspectives discoverable rather than ripping the internet's personality off behind an answer engine built with an LLM trained on top of the most accessible brain dump of humanity.

PS: I also feel using a chat bot to search makes us humans dumb.  Here's another post , that highlights why chat bots for search is a really bad idea. It's not a really good search experience too.