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j45 • yesterday at 6:15 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

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.


Replies

addaon • yesterday at 6:44 PM

> Google's organic search results are ranked by quality

What does this even mean? They're ranked by metrics that are assumed to be a proxy for quality, but (a) the accuracy of those proxies varies widely and (b) the ranks are relative; if a result is no longer in the response pool the fact that it would have been higher quality is invisible. Consider the year where anyone who's profile had been tagged as a software developer couldn't find any information on tost rings for sailplane towing because the "autocorrection" to toString was so strong that no mechanism besides logging out gave any relevant results; there's always crap like this going on.