Remember Google-Fu? We all knew the internet was full of great information, and we just had to learn to finesse our search parameters to find what we needed. It was fun - like learning a secret code! People doing Google-fu weren’t engineers optimizing the PageRank algorithm, they were just everyday people trying to find relatively niche pieces of information.
For them, and for myself, googling became a more personalized and much more efficient upgrade over researching information via traditional libraries and print. No more manual, alphabetic lookups in encyclopedias, or digging through the backpage index for keywords.
Gradually we all learned to take our human language thoughts, and convert them into a “keyword query” language of sorts to find what we needed. This was a huge and revolutionary shift in learning!
But another shift is coming, and if you truly don't want to read the rest of this blog post, just watch the video in this fantastic tweet: “A search engine would implode from this input”. Yeah, this is a big deal!
Search is shifting again
Two things are happening today that, to me, are indicative of another shift. The demise of Google Search, and the rise of LLMs.
Google results are a mess
Much hand-wringing has occurred over the last few years, as the Zillennial digital natives and Millenial early adopters complain about the internet today and reminisce the web of our youth, some of which may just be nostalgia.
But one thing we seem to all agree upon is that Google Search really does suck now. Whether the blame lies with SEO, Google’s own business strategy, or just a changing web doesn’t really matter. As Cory Doctorow scathingly wrote recently in Wired,
Today's Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
But, there are still use cases
Google Search certainly still has utility in my life. Looking through my recent searches, the vast majority fall into one of these categories:
Up-to-date news and live event info
Prices for accessories and travel
Image searches
Website names for sites I want to reach but can’t be bothered to type out as a URL
<search_term> wikipedia
As an aside, I still frequently use one of the greatest and overlooked human inventions ever put together, Wikipedia, which remains phenomenal for introductory info I find myself looking up all the time on history, geography, science, sports, and individuals.
When you want to learn, LLMs are superior
But when I want to comprehend a complex topic → not just learn the idea of it, but actually start to understand it, ChatGPT has been revolutionary. Many others have written at length about the countless ways to empower yourself using ChatGPT, so I’ll just speak personally. I’ve had tremendous success using ChatGPT as my personal mentor, my senior advisor, and my tutor.
The old way
When I used to want to know about a new piece of software, I’d google it to learn the basics I’d google it again to try to find example use cases, and then again to reroute to StackOverflow to hopefully find examples of how it could pertain to my tech stack and ideas. I might even buy a textbook! It was slow going, and debugging my mistakes was even slower, when the error messages and use cases did not match anything I found online.
The new way
Now, I have an LLM that understands exactly the custom problem and tech stack I am working on, can recommend and explain the tradeoffs of different pieces of software and architecture. It can help come up with code and implement exactly what I’m looking for. It can then debug that code, explain the limitations, and propose design improvements. I can go from knowing nothing about a piece of software to integrating it into my side projects in an hour.
It’s not just software topics. I have similar message threads where I use ChatGPT to learn and apply that knowledge to my given needs on:
Finance and investing
Taxes
Language learning
Travel planning
Healthcare
Yes, these are all things I used to seek out information on by googling, with mixed results. But being able to pursue these topics with an LLM who “knows” me, who “knows” my needs and objectives, and can provide responses accordingly, is a huge unlock. Not only that, but being able to ask for clarification, followup, hypotheticals, and examples transforms the learning from memorizing information to understanding applications!
This, more than anything, has blown me away, and has me turning to ChatGPT, or at times, Perplexity.ai, which has just raised a ton of money as an AI integrated search-engine (though honestly, I’ve not really found it to be more effective than just chatting directly with ChatGPT on most topics).
So what happens to the art of Google-Fu?
Well, frankly, we don’t need it anymore!
Google-Fu was hard to do, and so is sifting through search results or reading sometimes highly technical and esoteric Wikipedia articles. We all sound like that woman on a variety of topics, and when we are similarly unsure how to explain our thoughts succinctly, it’s going to be very hard to find the answers we seek.
Any complex ask that requires coming up with a clever way to use keywords to find the niche information you need can now be spoken directly to an LLM, not Google!
Skip the thought exercise of using keywords, and just ask LLMs using natural language. Be lengthy! Be verbose! You can even ramble a little and provide anecdotes like the woman in the video at the top of this article.
An excellent engineer better than I could incorporate new software quickly without ChatGPT, and someone versed in personal finance could quickly lookup information on currency inflation in today’s Google. For topics they know well, they can navigate.
But, we’re ready for a new verb
We all have many topics we are more ignorant on! And in fact, those are the very topics we are most likely to be googling in an effort to start to learn more, trying to find the right keywords and avoid the confusing SEO and advertisements that clutter the results.
But why go through that headache? The future of lookup and general learning is here, and for the first time in history, it can be done using natural language, at any skill level, available to everyone.
You shouldn’t be googling much anymore, you should now learn online the same way you do interacting with other humans - through chatting!