If you know the websites you trust most for technology news, for example, you can prioritize them in a traditional web search in a way that AI might not be able to. Researchers from UC San Diego have found that AI web searches will sometimes pick sources because they’re more relevant to the query, rather than because they’re ranked as more authoritative.
That means a personal blog might get chosen above a professional health care site if the AI deems it to be a closer match to what the user is actually searching for. This is a choice that you would be much less likely to make when scanning a traditional list of results, as you’d typically pick the one you trusted the most.
Other areas where traditional searching still wins out are for breaking news (there can sometimes be a lag in the timeliness of the data AI pulls up) and for high-stakes searches where you absolutely cannot make a mistake—searches related to health, the law, or your finances, for instance.
For answers that could land you in jail, you may be best doing more of the research yourself.Courtesy of David Nield
If you do feel like an AI approach is needed, be sure to double- and triple-check the sources the chatbot has used, which should be linked inside the answer. If you’re in any doubt, you can ask the AI for clarification on where something was sourced from, to make sure it isn’t an LLM invention.
Classic Google searches can still turn up false information on the web, of course, but you’re in a much better position to discern what’s true and accurate and what isn’t without a chatbot in the middle. For queries where that’s more important than convenience and speed, there’s still a place for the old way of searching the web.