alt Hacker News> but it doesn't return better search results.
It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.
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It seems this way - however, it's not.
Google's organic search results are ranked by quality (including how many people click on them).
AI, generally thinks the best result is what's most common, or average, resulting in decent results, but not the best for what you're looking for.
We notice it when we're looking for a level of specificity google can hit, compared to an ai model. It's why Google's AI search can hit a bit differen too.
The example that comes to top of mind is a search that is not made for search rarely can compare to something as well as Perplexity.
Google makes a search engine for regular people. It used to make a search engine for engineers, but it has mostly killed that style of searching off.
"News oil prices trump iran" became "Why is gas 20 cents more today? Did something happen with Trump and Iran talks?"
This change even predates LLMs. Regular people were constantly sending queries like that 10+ years ago.