the way search engines work is not because it’s the best way to search, but because of the best technology available in the late 1990s and we are stuck in that paradigm. Maybe there is a better way, but change is hard.

Search engine design, both mobile and desktop, is stuck in a local maxima but the content we consume has changed. A lot of it is in graph form (social networks), data streams (social feed), video content (Youtube and TikTok), ecommerce, and authoritative knowledge (Wikipedia), apps etc.

Instead of using a big database and searching on it, we need to use that database as training data, and generate results with a neural network.

trained models are really tiny compared to the training data. Stable Diffusion is like ~2 gigabytes but the training data is 100 terabytes

Instead of searching for something, and then opening the first few results and scanning for the content we want, while fighting millions of popups, ads, and weight loss scams, one needs to be able to generate the answer they are looking for.

This would completely bypass the distribution monopoly and advertising business of incumbents, as training a model is expensive (for now) but running it is not (the marginal cost of a Google search is negligible, but the cost of maintaining their infrastructure is very much not).