You might be right about search being "dead." Nonetheless, I think this is a hugely detrimental development.
Hallucinations and misrepresentations aside, my problem with LLMs as search engines is that they purport to give you "the truth" based on the "truth" it thinks you want to see from your query.
While I think LLMs do a much better job of natural language search than search engines do, they also remove the critical thinking that's employed in going through a list of results, processing the information therein and rendering a result.
LLMs might short-circuit the need to trawl through that "crappy blog," but they can, just as well, exclude key information in that blog that adds important context to what you're looking for.
You're doing the right thing by continuously refining your answer and cross-checking it with other LLMs, but I'm sure you've also met many people who use the Gemini AI overview answer and call it a day (which has been hilariously wrong in some searches I've done with it). Regardless, I still strongly believe that well-formed search queries beat rounds of refining LLMs every time.
Hallucinations and misrepresentations aside, my problem with LLMs as search engines is that they purport to give you "the truth" based on the "truth" it thinks you want to see from your query.
While I think LLMs do a much better job of natural language search than search engines do, they also remove the critical thinking that's employed in going through a list of results, processing the information therein and rendering a result.
LLMs might short-circuit the need to trawl through that "crappy blog," but they can, just as well, exclude key information in that blog that adds important context to what you're looking for.
You're doing the right thing by continuously refining your answer and cross-checking it with other LLMs, but I'm sure you've also met many people who use the Gemini AI overview answer and call it a day (which has been hilariously wrong in some searches I've done with it). Regardless, I still strongly believe that well-formed search queries beat rounds of refining LLMs every time.