This post is about the attentional leverage of searching through AI, specifically with the Poe Web Search bot. Sometimes the AI gives me the answer in the summary, sometimes it gives me the link where I need to dig deeper, sometimes it doesn’t find anything good. Regardless…there is no attentional rabbit hole.
What are my figures of merit?
- Time to a good answer — the time cost or opportunity cost.
- # of tabs opened to get to a good answer — the cost of attention-switching, which I’m really trying to avoid.
One of the traps of a traditional search engine is that it really feels like you’re doing important work. You are on a detective case. You are weeding out the nonsense. You are finding the hidden gems. If you truly enjoy searching and browsing for the sake of searching and browsing, then more power to you and please don’t let me ruin your pastime.
But I ain’t got time for that ish. More importantly, I ain’t got attention for that ish. I want the answer now, even if it’s just to know that there isn’t a good answer on the web. If I can’t have it now, then I want the answer with as little attention switching as possible.
In my experience, Poe Web Search is “smarter” than Bing. In other words - better results and no ads. What’s even cooler is that once I get the answer, I can quickly input that into one of many very useful Poe bots: Claude 2, GPT-4, Code Llama, 6 Hats Helper, etc. Poe is kind of like Inspector Gadget - there is a chat bot for every job.
I’m trying not to make recommendations these days. Just sharing what works for me.
