The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
I also like traditional results, which is how I got into this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the conversation right now is about AI-assisted answers, and just revised to make that more clear what I referring to.
In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.
We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).
I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at the end of a query.
One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.
The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)