For the longest time I’ve been against this train of thought. Even resisted this when GPT-3 was announced and then ChatGPT was said to replace Google.
But I’m slowly coming around to the camp that for specific searchers where you want a quick answer, ChatGPT beats Google hands down and my searching habits are changing. Interesting times.
I’m not OP but I do much fewer Google searches now as well.
Prior to ChatGPT, the majority of my Google searches ended up on either Wikipedia (for direct information), Reddit (for opinions/advice), or StackOverflow (for programming questions).
Now all those use cases can be done by ChatGPT, and it’s faster, especially because it requires less skimming to find useful data.
This actually has made me less happy with chatgpt.
If I wanted to google something (or bing, whatever), I would have done that. A major draw for me has been that chatgpt was providing a much better experience than search engines.
Google search is terrible. Chatgpt is definitively better for searching right now, and i often find myself reaching for it over google for a wide category of questions.
The thing is, ChatGPT doesn't do search. And we don't want search - we want information, which we obtain by searching. If ChatGPT provides curated search results and compiles them into a neat paragraph, along with some associated links for more information, that itself is more than useful compared to search. To take into account stats, more than 50% of searches end at Google because most of the required information is provided in fact boxes.
My patterns of search have changed due to chatgpt. So for example when coding instead of routinely looking up tutorials and S/O ill have chatgpt open and run through issues step by step and dig down for background when I don't understand a concept. Its a different type of interaction than a google, but it effectively replaces a lot of searches.
Where its not a replacement for search is up to date information, or finding specific domains when I forget the exact url. For the former I usually have to add "hacker news" or "reddit" or "forum" to get quality info anyway.
Honestly I think its overdelivered, its shocking how useful it is. And crazy to think of what you could do with it right now, let alone as it grows and training options expand.
Around a week or two ago I would have said the google-search-competition thing was bull, not now. Not that google is in a bad place, but I dont think search will stay the same for long.
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