You’re trying to explain by ignoring my question regarding your source not once but twice.

And also conveniently ignoring the actual point being made and instead focusing on whether or not its 75% or 85% or what is an algorithm

And also dismissing arguments because its morally beneath you.

I guess you just like being super pedantic because apparently you do know the difference between directory based searches and what came after it. Feel free to argue how yahoo and altavista was fine and the world really didn’t need Google search though.

The aggregates tell a very different story.

Tell me what aggregates you are seeing. I have no idea what you are looking at on this page that is suppose to prove your point on accuracy.

Because right now you brought up a benchmark site and then just saying how all benchmarks are skewed. That’s fine and all but can you tell me what you are actually looking at so we can be on the same page??

And again, at 75% or 70%, or whatever you imagine current accuracy is, what happened to all the memes about Gemini telling you to add bleach to pancakes or something? Low hanging karma posts just literally disappeared. Why do you think that is? A google search for “funny gpt answers” brings up results from 2024. Let that sink in.

I’m not even going to bother with the “I’m fine paying with my data” bit, because think that’s just a morally broken take.

I imagine it’s quite the burden being so morally superior to the vast majority of humanity.

There’s no such thing as “algorithmic search”

What Larry Page came up with was Pagerank, which is a ranking algorithm.

Bro…

Meaning that there isn’t a LLM that does any benchmarked task with an accuracy above 75%, see https://llm-stats.com/

Tell me what you are seeing. This page you linked shows all top models for AI research at above 80% and the top ones at 90%.

Here is an April article stating Gemini AI summary at 90%. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html

And keep on mind these benchmarks will use more complex searches than what people use normally.

75% sounds like 2025, but let’s say that is the the number we both agree to. That’s still useful enough most of the time that you wouldn’t scroll or search further. AND it requires you to take the stance that technology remains at a standstill and never improves over time. Let me ask you this. 1 year ago reddit and lemmy had plenty of posts showing awful and memey AI summary and search results. Where are those posts now?

Finally the money part. I point you to Youtube. A company that was never , got bought out and still remains free* to this day. Is it enshittified from before? Yes. But its still not withdrawing a dime from my bank account.

I guess the part I don’t understand here is that you must know that all these companies make money from their users, one way or another, and still you believe you aren’t paying for any of it. Are you ok with how they make that money, then?

I am perfectly aware of the situation. But i don’t have a doomerism view on it that a lot of you share. If we never shared our any of our data,

1. We would not have these services most likely. Where do you think traffic and routing data comes from when you use Google Maps? Do you think the average person would prefer paying some company for GPS, and worse everything experience? Would the average person pay monthly for something like a 100 MB email mailbox?

2. For that reason I’m more ok trading data for service. Most of the time that data use is for monetary purposes which motivates the company to also improve said service (to a point).

That said I fully support more regulation to the industry on how data is handled in general.

Text search is fine but not better than something that can both find you the most likely result you are looking for AND explain it to you if its too technical.

Text search is what Yahoo and Ask Jeeves did. Then Google improved on it by adding algorithmic search.

I bring up accuracy because its not 100% accurate. But if it works 85- 90 percent of the time, which it currently does according to benchmarks, that’s more efficient than Text search even accounting for times you need to adjust.

And no its not as cost efficient, but again I dont care as the end user because its not my cost.

You really believe that these multi trillion companies don’t make a profit? That they offer their products for free? Such a naive take.

Are you like, being purposefully ignorant here? I’m pointing out the fact that these trillion dollar companies weren’t profitable for years on end before they became so. And in the end their profitability is irrelevant to me. I don’t care how much AI costs them if they arent charging me for it.

And stop with your pedantic “you think free is free omg” argument. Go pay with actual money for your subpar searches then while your data is still being collected everywhere

I’m going to be straightforward with you and say that if someone doesn’t want to read documentation, they shouldn’t be doing the job the documentation is for.

That’s way too black and white. It’s a time and convenience thing. Let’s say i want to troubleshoot something on my motherboard that caused my pc to stop working. I really do not want to be reading through a 300 page manual from my phone (because my pc is not working). Search may turn up 10-20 relevant results that id have to scroll through.

And AI could take my query and do the work for me. Give me the link to the result they think is most relevant as well as explain it in more layman way than the manual.

I’m technical so I could do this without AI. But let’s take a less technical person. Now they can follow along and try as well.

The function is good. Its arguably the best path forward. The issue is accuracy and cost.

But something does not need to be accurate 100% of the time if we are all aware of it. If we wait for something to be 100% perfect nothing would ever progress.

And cost should only concern us on the environmental side. We should absolutely force them to fix that side of it. But price wise? Im really confused why the internet continues to bring up cost. I honestly dont care how much it costs a trillion dollar company to provide a service to us if I dont have to pay. Google, Youtube, Amazon, Netflix, all operated in the red for years and years. I don’t remember public discourse being omg how is Google going to afford to keep giving us nonshitty search.

Not everyone enjoys reading documentation. We don’t need to be defensive about this. We already have search that can trawl through a well maintained site.

AI can not only go through the documentation but also translate it to layman and point to the sources.

If it gives the wrong answer 1 in every thousand results, it is still undeniably useful. You shouldn’t blindly trust AI is common place knowledge. And it’s no different than doing a Google search for something and some times clicking into a result that is bad. The fact that that possibility exists doesn’t change the fact google is "undeniably " useful.

In the not so distant future just about every site will have AI summarization or QnA as a core part.

Instead of searching through endless documentation you ask AI to trawl and give you the answer. This is undeniably useful. But if they give the wrong answer once and suddenly become liable, that’s a potential risk.