I just realised that in the past whole week I've done like 10 Google searches and over 100+ chatgpt chats.<p>I never realized that defeating Google would ever be possible but here we are. Just wondering if my profile is unique (as I'm a dev so most of my queries are generally very tech related) or other people are doing the same?
Not in the slightest. I'm not claiming Google's searches are great - they are declining and I think we all know it. But ChatGPT is no better in terms of actual accuracy of facts. So no, I'll take the instant full page of results that I have years of practice skimming to decide where to dig deeper vs. a slowly scrolling word-by-word experience that makes me feel like I'm back on a modem and gives me absolutely no easy links to delve deeper into a topic.<p>For the record, I completely agree that AI can beat Google in the long run. But we aren't there yet.
I can relate to the 10-for-Google-90-for-ChatGPT ratio.<p>I use Google when I know the words that make up the name of a website, but not the URL itself. So Google is for unsophisticated searches. I also use Google instead of HN's own search function when looking for older submissions here.<p>What I like about about ChatGPT (and friends) is the ability to synthesize knowledge from unrelated bits and pieces in different sources.<p>In contrast, if it could verbalize what it's doing to you, a traditional search engine would say here's a link dump, have fun with it, and have a nice day.<p>If half the knowledge you're looking for is stored on web page A towards the bottom, and the other half on web page B in the first few paragraphs, a traditional search engine will dump on you links to web pages A and B, followed by some filler URLs pointing at documents that happen to vaguely match your search keywords. This is a very subpar experience by today's standards, but it's so ingrained into our habits that we're not complaining.
I'm probably using Google less but just relying on ChatGPT is such a PITA with the hallucinations and how its reasoning just breaks down a few prompts in. It will "forget" instructions, mess up output formats, any facts have to be double-checked, etc. It barely worth the effort sometimes.
Stopped using Google search many years ago and now don't use any of their services.
Here's a clue... <a href="https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-trackers-are-from-google" rel="nofollow">https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-tra...</a>
I almost never ask search to explain stuff. I mainly use it to find other websites that I know exist. So I continue to do that. I have used chatgpt to get explanations or summaries of stuff, but I find very little overlap between the kind of things I do with it and how I use search.<p>Do others use search differently?
Not really. My interests are in areas that a ChatGPT answer isn't really all that useful in, namely discoveries in the subject areas I'm interested in. When it comes to strats for video game speedruns or mod updates, these language models don't seem particularly useful.<p>What has stopped me using Google as much though is that sadly many of these communities seem to have picked Discord as their communication method of choice, and hence most of the useful information isn't publicly searchable at all.
I find using ChatGPT useful in getting an answer that is likely to the average of most of the information out there.<p>I still use Google, but as others have said, the list of links is just that, a list of links.<p>On the coding side, I do not find the code produced by ChatGPT to be great. But I do like the fact that I can ask it for a module that does X and it often can identify one of more modules.<p>That is something I find hard to get out of Google as developers do not always put the best keywords or use cases in the online docs.
Barely, if at all. To me they serve largely exclusive purposes. I've used ChatGPT for some code generation purposes, but I don't use it for searching the web. The old idea that "people want answers, not pages" is largely <i>not</i> true in my case.<p>There is, of course, <i>some</i> overlap, and yeah, I've dabbled with ChatGPT for a few queries that were more in the mode of "want an answer, as opposed to a page". But by and large Google is still my first stop for most searches.
Kind of.. I find myself using ChatGPT more when I'm looking for information and explaination (I do fact-check if it's something I need to use, but then I gained more of an idea of what to actually search for on google).<p>So ChatGPT is my starting point when looking for information.
Google is my starting point when looking for articles or specific sites or subjects where I want/need the full information and other media such as video and images.
No, it's too slow and I can't trust it to give me true facts instead of hallucinations. When I look at a page of results from a search engine I see the sources and I can assess which one can be trusted. Sometimes none of them but at least I know it.<p>I use chatgpt to generate code. That's maybe batter than looking at Stackoverflow.
Yes, checking the ChatGPT interface, yesterday I had 16 conversations, which are usually 5-10 prompts deep. And I only searched for 3 random things on Google (1. finding the azure status page, 2) checking if the spelling of a word was correct 3) and something which I assume is a Typo that made it into my search bar.
I was, and then ChatGPT became slow and unreliable. OpenAI does not know how to do production. I cancelled my paid plan and I generally do not like how they operate as a company of late.<p>Now using Bard more and just got early access to Google's generative search, though I cannot use it on my primary machine due to account snafus...