zlacker

Speaking for my own n of 1, ChatGPT Pro has almost entirely (>90%) replaced the Google search engine in my daily life. The results from ChatGPT are just so much better and faster.

That's got to be worth something, since Alphabet is a $1.7T company mostly on the strength of ads associated with Google search.

>>hilux+(OP)
Chat gpt is not a good source of truth so can’t be used for information retrieval at scale. You might have a specific usage pattern that is very different to the majority of Google Search users so it works for you

>>Mentlo+S
Searching Google is not a good source of truth either; especially their infoboxes which have been infamously and dangerously wrong. And if you follow a random search result link - well, who knows if the content on that site is trustworthy either!

>>Mentlo+S
the ad ridden shitware website filled with seo buzzwords with 100% opacity keywords also isn't a good source of truth. i'll take chatgpt over that.

>>Racing+O2
Sure, use a different search engine then.

To each their own.

>>hilux+(OP)
I used it in the beginning, but now I am back to google... I don't think the results were better with ChatGPT.

>>crypto+22
But you’re in control of your information retrieval, you didn’t have an unreliable agent synthesise bits in the middle.

Again - to each their own. But what people use google for GPT doesn’t replicate anyway (and what the Google business was built on) - which is commercial info retrieval.

>>hilux+(OP)
Google ads span much more farther than in search - it's all over internet, on all websites, mobile etc.

>>hilux+(OP)
For the past week or so I have been typing my search queries into Open AI, Bard and Duck Duck Go to compare them.

I haven't finished making up my mind, the the AI's are doing OK. I have only been asking it for code snippets that are easily verifiable.

>>Mentlo+S
Personally, I don't have use case for comparing Google and ChatGPT that has truth as a requirement in the output.

For the majority of my use of ChatGPT and Google, I need to be able to get useful answers to vague questions - answers that I can confirm for myself through other means - and I need to iterate on those questions to hone in on the problem at hand. ChatGPT is undoubtedly superior to Google in that regard.

>>Mentlo+S
Google is not a good source of truth at all, for anything other than hard facts. And nowadays, even the concept of "hard fact" is getting a bit fuzzy.

Google search reminds me of Amazon reviews. Years ago, basically trustworthy, very helpful. Now ... take them with a tablespoon of salt and another of MSG.

And this is separate from the time-efficiency issue: "how quickly can I answer my complex question which requires several logical joins?", which is where ChatGPT really shines.

>>hilux+(OP)
Google doesn’t care if you’re going elsewhere to ask deep questions about Rust or whatever. They care way more that people go to them to look for the best bread mixer, or find a good restaurant, or a local massage therapist. In that regard I think Amazon is still a much bigger threat to them.

GPT is very useful as a knowledge tool, but I don’t see people going there to make purchasing decisions. It replaces stackoverflow and quora, not Google. For shopping, I need to see the top X raw results, with reviews, so I can come to my own conclusion. Many people even find shopping fun (I don’t) and wouldn’t want to replace the experience with a chatbot even if it were somehow objectively better.

>>jliptz+27
Fair enough. My questions are more likely to be about Fast.ai, but I get your point.

Did you see the recent article about a restaurant changing its name to "Thai Food near me"?

>>taberi+p4
Agreed, but this will probably be limited to domains where there’s better products

>>jliptz+27
Yea. No.

People stopping to use google for the small stuff will be the beginning of the end of google being the mental default for searches.

>>konsch+Z9
There is a wide variety of services available to people for specific use cases. When stack overflow came along, I used that for programming questions instead of google. But I still use google for most other searches.

I go to Amazon if I want to find a book or a specific product.

For the latest news, I come here, or Reddit, or sometimes twitter.

If I want to look up information about a famous person or topic, I go to Wikipedia (usually via google search). I know I can ask ChatGPT, but Wikipedia is generally more up to date, well-written and highly scrutinized by humans.

The jury’s still out on exactly what role ChatGPT will serve in the long term, but we’ve seen this kind of unbundling many times before and Google is still just as popular and useful as ever.

It seems like GPT’s killer app is helping guide your learning of a new topic, like having a personal tutor. I don’t see that replacing all aspects of a general purpose search engine though.

>>Mentlo+j3
As of a recent update, ChatGPT can do an internet search to answer "find a Thai restaurant near me." Of course, it uses Bing, not Google.

And for my single query above, ChatGPT searched multiple sources, aggregated the results, and offered a summary and recommendations, which is a lot more than Google would have done.

ChatGPT's major current limitation is that it just refuses to answer certain questions [what is the email address for person.name?] or gets very woke with some other answers.

>>jliptz+4d
Your last paragraph - yes! Many people haven't realized this yet.

She/he/it/them is an amazing programming tutor.