In a sense traditional search is just a really, really dumb LLM. They both injest a bunch of text and build an "index" based on the text.
Not really .. the significant difference is that a search engine is backed by a web crawler that is running continuously discovering new content, vs the LLM which has a fixed training set that will only be updated infrequently (very slow and expensive to retrain). Also, once a new web page, or new version of a web page, has been indexed by the crawler then you should be able to find it if your search terms match, while with an LLM all bets are off as to whether you can coax it to generate something based on something in the training set.
Totally agree getting fast updates of new content is a problem that still needs to be solved. In terms of finding matches, I think LLMs are already better than Google, for content that is there.
(A super-traditional search that's just looking for raw text, like the HN search, could claim an advantage there, but something like Google or Bing is already far far off in the land of guessing intention rather than raw text matching, in my experience; in any case, 99% of the time raw-text matching is not what you want, anyway.)
Maybe time will prove me wrong, but my prediction is LLMs will improve on their weak-points and traditional search will mostly fade away in relevence.
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Not really .. the significant difference is that a search engine is backed by a web crawler that is running continuously discovering new content, vs the LLM which has a fixed training set that will only be updated infrequently (very slow and expensive to retrain). Also, once a new web page, or new version of a web page, has been indexed by the crawler then you should be able to find it if your search terms match, while with an LLM all bets are off as to whether you can coax it to generate something based on something in the training set.
Totally agree getting fast updates of new content is a problem that still needs to be solved. In terms of finding matches, I think LLMs are already better than Google, for content that is there.
(A super-traditional search that's just looking for raw text, like the HN search, could claim an advantage there, but something like Google or Bing is already far far off in the land of guessing intention rather than raw text matching, in my experience; in any case, 99% of the time raw-text matching is not what you want, anyway.)
Maybe time will prove me wrong, but my prediction is LLMs will improve on their weak-points and traditional search will mostly fade away in relevence.