Ran into google's new LLM search answering system today; first time I've seen it so far, which I guess is impressive?
I did some poking and it seems like specific keyword searches - especially esoteric or technical ones - tend to not get LLM-generated answers, while "can you..." "how do you..." "does a..." "what is the..." questions do.
Which I guess makes sense; the goal appears to be to distill the hundreds of questionable link farm "answer" sites into a single (questionable?) answer 😅
The answer was, in fact, more or less correct, but since it's impossible to know the veracity of the information provided I still had to cross-reference it with the more reliable sources in the search results and it therefore saved me no actual time.
Verdict: Gemini (or whatever Google is calling it) is probably fine for general trivia type questions where it would take longer to find the appropriate Wikipedia page; I would still never trust LLMs in general for, like, legal or medical advice.
It appears to mostly just be a slightly fancier version of what you would get if you asked your Android phone or Google Home speaker a question, which again, is fine? Not my thing, but you do you.
@tess the funny thing is is that we only need an LLM engine to sort through the millions of trash copies of the same old forum posts and buried recipe sites because Google has completely broken the web by allowing feeding SEO back onto its own search.
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