LLM or web search?

Google search was always the default way I interacted with the internet. Somewhere along the time, websites started to suck, and I’d add “reddit” to the end of all of my queries

• “best restaurants in san francisco reddit”
• “public bathrooms new bedford reddit”
• “is 25 an hour good intern salary reddit nyc”

I don’t really remember when I started suffixing “reddit” to everything, but I could, for the most part, tell that Reddit comments were from actual humans. Reddit does have bots, but the upvote/downvote system puts the “best” human answers higher up.

Over time, I sorta started to get annoyed by what was considered the “best” by the hive mind of Reddit (which sometimes includes me too). Whenever I do serious research on Reddit, as we all do, I see useful comments overshadowed by stupid jokes. I don’t think these jokes are bad, but it gets annoying to see them consistently voted higher than the “valuable” answers. I almost felt bad seeing well-thought out comments get less upvotes than a “I’d also do this man’s dead wife” joke.

Anyways, enough Reddit rant. When I Google search something, I’m not doing it with the intention of seeing the Gemini answer, but it’s often the first thing I see, and I am lazy. I’ll admit, I often take it as face value and don’t try to confirm the facts, even though I know that it’s often inaccurate.

I don’t like what’s happening here, with Gemini stealing the views from these websites. But some of these websites really do suck. I hate landing on a website buried in ads. And those news sites that make you read an entire unrelated backstory just to keep you scrolling and racking up accidental ad clicks are the worst.

Unfortunately, I do see myself leaning towards ChatGPT for more everyday searches with specific or technical answers. I still get on Reddit for opinion-based things.