How I search in 2024

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2024-04-26 05:00:05

We are now in a very weird liminal space in information retrieval for consumers, particularly those attuned to trends in search and working on the bleeding edge of LLMs.

On the one hand, we have the fall of old companies. Broadcast-based centralized social media, which steadily served as a newsfeed and realtime search for a small, vocal minority, is basically dead, or on its last legs. Search, namely Google, is basically a useless pile of ads and SEO gamification at this point and a stopping point for Reddit results. Everyone has written about it and covered this extensively.

On the other hand, we have the meteoric rise of these weird LLM things, which are really just statistical text generators but that people are using for information retrieval through paradigms like RAG which are a little like using a hammer to go fishing.

On the third hand (a very apt metaphor for generative art), on the heels of the large companies of the last 15 years declining, we have a new indie search engine scene emerging, hungry, armed with AI tooling, and ready to take back quality on the web.