Not to mention that the cost per search in terms of compute and energy is so much smaller for web search than for running an LLM. I forget the exact numbers now, but it was orders of magnitude as I recall.
Search engines are just cheaper to run. I don't know that there's a good, long term model for a free LLM-based search replacement because of how much higher the operating costs are, ad supported or not.
Search engines are just cheaper to run. I don't know that there's a good, long term model for a free LLM-based search replacement because of how much higher the operating costs are, ad supported or not.