The difference between search engines and GenAI tools
GenAI applications such are used more and more to search for information. There are fundamental differences between these apps and a search engine.
Search engines
When a task is given to a search engine, the engine will search within the index of collected webpages and order existing content. It then provides you with a list with links to relevant website where you can find the information. If there is no information in the database of the search engine, it cannot give you an answer and you will get 0 search results.
Large Language Model
When you ask a LLM a question (prompt), it will generate a new text based on statistical text patterns which its learnt; no existing information is retrieved from the database. The goal of a LLM is always to produce a plausible looking text which does not prioritize whether the answer is actually correct.
The latest AI tools are admittedly capable of looking for current information on the internet, just like a search engine, but the LLM then creates a new text based on the found results. This might make the chance of producing false information smaller, but it could still happen.Therefore it's is really important to always check the sources of the generated answer, since the GenAI tool might have misinterpreted the source, combined several contradicting sources or used an unreliable source.
The impact of GenAI and hallucination as output will be discussed further along in this module.
By now Google Search generates a response with Gemini AI as a first search result in many cases, without you explicitly asking. So far, there is no way to turn this off as a default. To get results without AI, you can add -ai to your search. Alternatively, you could use a different search engine such as DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage or Bing.