They're not that literal anymore of course, but they still don't compare to an LLM. In the end it's still mostly searching for key words even if with a few tweaks here and there, and the ability to answer vague questions mostly works by finding forums and Reddit posts where people ask that specific question and hopefully get an answer.
When you're asking a standard question like the capital of whatever, that works great.
When you have one of those weird issues, it often lands you in a thread somewhere in the Ubuntu forums where people tried to help this person, nothing worked, and the thread died 3 years ago.
Just the fact that LLMs can translate between languages already adds an amazing amount of usefulness that search engines can't have. There seems to be a fair amount of obscure technical info that's only available in Russian for some reason.
When you're asking a standard question like the capital of whatever, that works great.
When you have one of those weird issues, it often lands you in a thread somewhere in the Ubuntu forums where people tried to help this person, nothing worked, and the thread died 3 years ago.
Just the fact that LLMs can translate between languages already adds an amazing amount of usefulness that search engines can't have. There seems to be a fair amount of obscure technical info that's only available in Russian for some reason.