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janalsncmyesterday at 8:32 PM6 repliesview on HN

Sure, go ahead and ask the LLM who won the 2026 World Cup. Or nearby BBQ places open now.

Even assuming no hallucinations, an LLM can replace some use cases for search but not all.


Replies

Waterluvianyesterday at 8:57 PM

I tried both and it’s not even close which interface is better when it comes to answering a question. Google gives you stuff to sift through and interpret. AI just gives the answer.

Imagine you’re in the car or hands free or disabled and you just want the question answered.

https://ibb.co/whYmZWxs

https://ibb.co/JFkQbmJf

show 3 replies
FabCHyesterday at 9:05 PM

Claude Sonnet 5 Medium more or less on the timestamp of the comment:

Prompt: Who won the 2026 World Cup?

Answer: Spain won the 2026 World Cup, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute, coming on as a substitute in the 62nd minute. It’s Spain’s second World Cup title, having also won in 2010.

Prompt: Nearby BBQ places open now?

Answer: (a geolocation permission request prompt for the browser followed by) Right in [redacted] both [redacted] (4.6 stars, open until [redacted]) and [redacted] ([redacted]) are close and currently open.

A bit further out but highly rated: [redacted]

Seems like LLM does a good job on those questions…

show 1 reply
ashu1461yesterday at 11:45 PM

On a personal level if I used to do 100 google searches on a daily basis, now I would be doing only 10. And it is the case with everyone in the tech ecosystem at least. So it would be fair to assume that there share has reduced.

On the LLM side as well, I have not seen much people using Gemini vs the market share of Claude / Open AI.

The assumption of the long tail still using Gemini because it is bundled might be correct, but I am not even sure if that is something that Google will be happy with.

ffsm8yesterday at 8:36 PM

Fwiw, I've done those kinds of requests before and it did so successfully.

It did use Google to provide me with the answers though, sooo...

edoceoyesterday at 8:45 PM

The LLMs I've tried don't do well with very new stuff. Like Zig for example, they tell me answers that were good for Zig 0.12 but we on 0.16 now. So I've got to feed them the latest docs, then do the AI dance.

Forgeties79yesterday at 8:58 PM

Whether it's a good choice or not sadly doesn't change the current reality. People now use ChatGPT as a replacement for google.