ChatGPT is like living in an information tunnel. It’s amazing but it doesn’t replace search for me at all. Irony is when it does search, because it’s obviously just doing a quick crawl it actually makes things worse as it treats whatever shit it finds as authoritative - which, as anyone working on RAG knows, is a whole world of problems on its own.
This is absolutely not to say that Google can be considered ‘good’ these days.
Yeah they merged browsing into ChatGPT and it worsened the experience. I dread seeing the browsing icon show up to a question as the ai will get dumber.
I've addressed this by adding a custom instruction to only search when necessary, when it can't give a good answer otherwise. Pretty much cuts the searching down to when I explicitly ask it to do so.
Exactly the same for me, I've found answers derived from chat GPT training to be way more useful than the browser search answers. Half the time it doesn't work, it ads a lot of waiting time and it provides answers way less comprehensive. I have used the custom "classic" GPT bot when I have wanted to avoid Bing search answers.
This is absolutely not to say that Google can be considered ‘good’ these days.
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