Search is always faster than asking an LLM if I have a general idea of what I am looking for. I may consult an LLM if I want to compare things or kick off deep research, but most of the time I find myself having to go back and forth with it and correcting assumptions it made.
According to my Kagi stats, I am averaging around 3k searches per month.
I can’t help but feel that you are really missing out on a lot of results when just relying on LLMs for search.
I'm with the GP. To me LLMs are just better search engines. In the most literal sense. They have their own index and can generate links if you want them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269481
By “their own index” i assume you mean training data? If so, thats a big part of the issue for me. As an example, if I ask an LLM for some part of the Zig stdlib, I will get an incorrect answer 10/10 times because it will refuse to look up the latest documentation.
Looking through some of my history of today:
- “github rate-limits”
- “oriental hornet”
- “riva 88 florida”
- “logistic map”
- “zeiss euv mirror”
- “authentik helm”
Just to name a few…
For a lot of these, LLMs would slow me down significantly. Most of the time I already know exactly what im looking for.