From hitting enter to seeing something, ofc it's slower.

From hitting enter to a set of relevant answers loaded into your brain, though? Isn't that the goal that should be measured? Against that goal, the two decade old approach seems to have peaked over a decade ago, or phind wouldn't find traction.

For the 20 year old page rankers, time from search to a set of correct answers in your brain is approaching “DNF” -- did not finish.

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PS. Hallucinations or irrelevant results, both require exercising a brain cell. On a percentage basis, there are fewer hallucinations than irrelevant results, it's just that we gave up on SERP confidence ages ago.

It's one of those triangles with speed \ accuracy / cost.

You can have a small model that's cost effective to serve, and gives fast responses, but will be wrong half the time.

Or you can have a large model that's slow to run on cheap hardware, but will give more accurate answers. This is usually only fast enough for personal use.

And the third option with a large model that's fast and accurate, and you'll have to pay Nvidia/Groq/etc. a small fortune to be able to run it at speed and also probably build a solar powerplant to make it cost effective in power use.

This is true in my experience. Before searching for something I often try to guess whether it will take me more time to quickly go over Google results or watch Perplexity Pro slowly spitting the answer line-by-line.

I think they're both key issues - when the results are accurate, they're too slow; and you can't trust the results when you get there because they're often inaccurate