AI Is Not a Search Engine

A search engine finds existing pages someone already wrote. A chatbot writes a fresh answer on the spot.

They feel similar, but they're very different — and mixing them up causes trouble.

• Retrieval (search) — brings back real sources you can open and check
• Generation (chatbot) — produces new text that sounds right, but may not be true and often has no source

Generated text is a confident guess, not a looked-up fact.