> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources.

And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.

You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.

Even before the AI era I slowly became less and less successful with google searches. Everything - non trivial / specific - that I looked for turned into a chore and I quickly gave up.

LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.

I don't trust facts from humans. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find direct sensor readings. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the human output.

Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.

Sometimes I use chatgpt thinking mode for searches when I expect there will be a lot of noise. "What are some in-depth reviews for <some book I've heard of>"

Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?

Yeah pretty much.

I have seen it hallucinate things confidently but that is usually when it has no direct sources to pin down the output.