> But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place.
Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.
Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
Their inability to adapt to fix the problems caused by AI and SEO have caused the product to fall apart and users went somewhere else. I do think however their decision to make search tedious for users by moving the correct answer deep into the page (or at least favouring pages that did that) was a brilliant play for advertising but has killed a lot of their core use, making it easier to leave.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket"
- Eric Hoffer
I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time).
Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.
I remember in around 2011 realizing that ~85% of the first page of Google search results was ads. I haven’t used Google search much in the last 5 years, mostly due to this but also because of how they rewarded blog spam.
Which is one thing technologists often screw up: They misinterpret how people react to change; and they misinterpret how people really use their products.
Google Search used to be (and still is) a way to find places on the internet. As much as I like AI in searches, I agree; when I want to find the thing, I don't want AI getting in the way.
- Eric Hoffer
I've been playing the Ocarina of Time remake and whenever I get stuck trying to get a certain item or progress on a quest, I'll fire up Claude voice chat and ask it for guidance, and it regularly gets confused and gives me wrong answers (somewhere around ~30% of the time).
Given how long these models have been out and that it's a highly constrained game world from almost 30 years ago which is documented top to bottom, I struggle to understand how Claude is still so bad at straightforward questions with straightforward answers. This was a solved problem (albeit with a less modern UX) in the legacy internet and it doesn't actually feel like getting the right answer is necessarily easier.