Linux was out in 1991 ... Google was a late comer in 1998 and which for many years other search engines, both in general and perhaps more in the field I did a lot of web searching, returned much better results. Google eventually began to perform much better returning a slightly more good results iirc around 2002 and then further improving results ... also as M$ and a few other players having specialist string search engines banned from the web, (if anyone recalls M$ being upset people could search for some of their code being leaked ... ) google was the next best alternative though incredibly limited to do the same.
Interesting that this is their approach I think in time we will find not specialized llms but instead a single big one like chatgpt exposed is the winner because it allows for a faster and easier way to access information without knowing the domain ahead of time. When google came out in the late 90s we had to learn the right way to search and that became a skill… the advantage of natural language as the interface is the possible removal of needing to know the right questions to ask as precisely as we have had to in the past. To me that is the big break through of chatgpt with respect to search and it remains to be seen if and when google will figure that out…
