David Pierce with a report-style blog on comparing different search engines and how Google still mostly wins on speed.

David writes:

But the thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things. For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there’s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type “google” into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day.

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This is key. Google is a learned habit for many people. Going by the usual pattern, these AI search engines need to be 10x better at a key habitual experience that will convince people to bring this into their workflow. David identifies the buried-information queries as an area where they shine:

There is one sub-genre of information queries in which the exact opposite is true, though. I call them Buried Information Queries. The best example I can offer is the very popular query, “how to screenshot on mac.” There are a million pages on the internet that contain the answer — it’s just Cmd-Shift-3 to take the whole screen or Cmd-Shift-4 to capture a selection, there, you’re welcome — but that information is usually buried under a lot of ads and SEO crap. All the AI tools I tried, including Google’s own Search Generative Experience, just snatch that information out and give it to you directly. This is great! 

I have a hypothesis. This is the exact kind of information a certain subset of people use google for: developers who search for information from a specific manual, parameters of an API etc; and people like me who postfix a “reddit” into their query to get around these SEO crap.

I think this is the biggest threat vector for Google today. Both publicly as there are millions of examples of how search’s gone bad – the enshittification theory and also internally as this isn’t an existential threat to Google: not unless they treat this as a habit changer.

However, as humans, I strongly recommend you try every tool in your arsenal. I’m experimenting with some utilities that will allow me to get SGE type results from multiple of these as a comparison.

Back to the topic of chatbots as UI, Amelia writes:

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that chatbots are a terrible interface for LLMs. Or, at the very least, that we can add controls, information, and affordances to our chatbot interfaces to make them more usable. I can’t wait to see the field become more mature and for us to start building AI tools that embrace our human abilities.

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/boo-chatbots

I highly recommend going through that brilliant site. It’s a beautiful digital garden.

The post The world continues to realize that a chatbot isn’t the best interface for AI first appeared on @gurupanguji.