More Thoughts on AI and LLMs in Search

My friend and I were discussing AI/LLM search, and while I think some LLM search can be useful, you have to make it work for you. I think this is a big change from traditional search, and with the way things are going and more people using AI search, either people need to learn how to use them correctly or the search companies need to make the search better. Or both.

Normally, you would Google something like "7-day healthy meal plan". You'd get a list of links to various websites that offered generic 7-day meal plans, you'll get some health food websites with recipes, and you'd likely get some nutritionist websites that will possibly help you tailor a diet to you specifically and consider allergies or whatever. You can dive in here and do your research. This takes more time and effort but can be very much worth it in the end.

With an LLM you don't get all this. Generally, it spits out what you ask for and nothing else. You ask it for a healthy 7-day meal plan and it'll spit out a generic "healthy" meal plan for 7 days based on the top couple of results from a web search. It's not going to personalize it or provide nutritional information or consider allergies by default. You have to ask it for this additional information and how you would like it to be presented. Sure, it looks cool when you ask it for something and it spits out this formatted wall of text, but I don't think this is ready for prime time. It's another public alpha product from big tech.