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I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up

by nomilk on 4/30/25, 1:47 AM with 99 comments

  • by BobbyTables2 on 4/30/25, 2:05 AM

    I hate peoples unrealistic expectations of AI but also find Bing CoPilot to be really useful.

    Instead of structuring a Google query in an attempt to find a relevant page filled with ads, I just ask Copilot and it gives a fully digested answer that satisfied my question.

    What surprises me is that it needs very little context.

    If I ask ‘ Linux "sort" command line for sorting the third column containing integers’, it replies with “ sort -k3,3n filename” along with explanations and extensions for tab separated columns.

  • by SecretDreams on 4/30/25, 2:27 AM

    I could equally say I've largely replaced Google search with Google Gemini.

    The Gemini product seems to be evolving better and faster than chatgpt. Probably doing so cheaper, too, given they have their own hardware.

    I am pleasently surprised how Gemini went from bad to quite good in less than a year.

  • by rr808 on 4/30/25, 2:39 AM

    Google search has the fundamental problem that they try to get people to follow links to content so the content writers get some traffic. If chatgpt doesn't show sources why would anyone bother to write content?

    Imagine having a blog which has 4 LLMs as users and never know hundreds, thousands or millions of people are using your work.

  • by breadwinner on 4/30/25, 2:11 AM

    Google is turning into Alta Vista right before our eyes!

    I have replaced Google with Perplexity. It backs up every answer with links, so I find it to be more trustable than ChatGPT.

    Perplexity also keeps their index current, so you're not getting answers from the world as it existed 10 months ago. (ChatGPT says its knowledge cutoff is June 2024, Perplexity says its search index includes results up to April 29, 2025, and to prove it, it gives me the latest news.)

  • by moepstar on 4/30/25, 5:11 AM

    Reading the comments, i find remarks about Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, Kagi.

    What i wonder: (apparently) no one uses DeepSeek?

    I do, and i pretty much like it, to be honest.

    More than Copilot at the very least, which, in a recent attempt to "vibe code" a small tool at work, hallucinated in at least large parts of the answers and had to be corrected by me over and over again (when i haven't written a single line of code in that language).

  • by roxolotl on 4/30/25, 2:50 AM

    Over the weekend I was looking up NCAA softball rankings and there was an acronym I couldn’t figure out, CPCT. Asking Claude and Gemini it was pure random generation. You can refresh google and get a different explanation every time. They are usually logical “a percentage representing conference success”, but every time it was extremely confident about a different meaning for the abbreviation.

    It’s less that they don’t know, I still have no clue what it stands it seems like no one defines it anywhere, it’s more that they show 0 evidence of not knowing. I still really struggle to understand how someone would genuinely replace research with LLMs. Argument sure, but fully replace? The likelihood of being convinced of a total falsehood still feels too high.

  • by techpineapple on 4/30/25, 2:06 AM

    I’m curious what he’s looking up and does he double check his sources? As we gradually move more and more into AI I think there’s going to be some weird impacts of information being more strictly curated, and I wonder how “AI-think” will start to impact the public square.

  • by Liftyee on 4/30/25, 2:09 AM

    I find AI to be mainly helpful at explaining new topics (precision not essential), but I don't trust exact facts and figures given by AI because of hallucination issues.

    Maybe I just don't have the right ChatGPT++ subscription.

  • by jasonthorsness on 4/30/25, 2:14 AM

    I did this today and Grok led me to make an embarrassingly wrong comment (Grok stated "Rust and Java, like C/C++ mentioned by Sebastian Aaltonen, leave argument evaluation order unspecified" - I now know this is wrong and both are strict left-to-right). ChatGPT gets it correct. But I think we're still in the "check the references" stage.

  • by incomingpain on 4/30/25, 11:05 AM

    I decommissioned my SearX engine in favour of chatAI of some flavour. chatgpt>grok>meta

    I do somehow end up on brave search often. I'll go to my url bar and search for a site I often use but not enough to have bookmark. Instead of just bringing me right to the site its a search for the site?

    They are favouring the search over the direct link all of a sudden?

  • by devmor on 4/30/25, 2:13 AM

    I don't doubt that ChatGPT is better than Google for looking things up.

    I also don't think ChatGPT is very reliable for looking things up. I think Google has just been degraded so far as a product that it is near worthless for anything more than the bottom 40% of scenarios.

  • by TYPE_FASTER on 4/30/25, 2:29 AM

    Same here. Plus, I can just ask it “where can a 16yr old rent a jet ski in Myrtle beach” and it will tell me the two options, instead of trying to find the answer on 5 different websites.

  • by caffinatedkitti on 4/30/25, 2:33 AM

    For coding questions, I prefer Grok. For grammar, I prefer ChatGpt. I still haven't found an use for Gemini - other than seeing some results on Google Search.

  • by nuker on 4/30/25, 2:32 AM

    But you can still search without being logged in on Google, privacy wise it is better. All my browsing is in Private tabs with iCloud Private Relay on.

  • by iJohnDoe on 4/30/25, 2:45 AM

    I think it’s interesting where we are today with AI responses in search results.

    Remember the uproar when Google started displaying the text results directly from the sites in the search results. It basically eliminated the need to visit the actual websites at all.

    Now, you get your answer right at the top without even looking at the search results themselves.

    I don’t know what this means in the long term for websites and online content.

  • by karmakaze on 4/30/25, 12:47 PM

    I started using Perplexity mostly for its up-to-date information. I've since largely replaced ChatGPT with Perplexity (where I would have used Google) because ChatGPT is slower and gets things wrong far more often.

    I use ChatGPT more for idea generation and iteration.

  • by not_a_bot_4sho on 4/30/25, 2:41 AM

    Same here but Copilot. It's free and it's honestly really good for search activity. I converted from Google.

    (Not for the integration in Bing, the copilot.microsoft.com minimalistic chat thing)

  • by bigyabai on 4/30/25, 1:53 AM

    > but it hasn't changed anything about what I write.

    I think most authors would argue the same thing, but it's really up to the readers to decide isn't it?

  • by moritonal on 4/30/25, 2:15 AM

    Yep, same. AI is the next form of interaction with the Internet. With websites serving as books did previously.

  • by asdev on 4/30/25, 2:17 AM

    If Google can somehow undo literally everything about SEO, then it can become useful again

  • by timoth3y on 4/30/25, 2:18 AM

    Even though I understand LLMs penchant for hallucination, I tend to trust them more than I should when I am busy and/or dealing with "non-critical" information.

    I'm wondering if ChatGPT (and similar products) will mimic social media as a vector of misinformation and confirmation bias.

    LMMs are very clearly not that today, but social media didn't start out anything like the cesspool it has become.

    There are a great many ways that being the trusted source of customized, personalized truth can be monetized, but I think very few would be good for society.

  • by dyauspitr on 4/30/25, 2:29 AM

    How long till we get ads in our LLM responses? I’m thinking about 2 years.

  • by timr on 4/30/25, 2:24 AM

    I use the various chatbots when I want a tutorial (e.g. math or some programming library). I can (in fact, must) verify these myself. This is strictly better than doing a bunch of queries and reading a bunch of blogs. I also use them for the class of queries where I don't even know how to begin: ("there is some expression in southern-US english involving animals, about being dumb, that sounds like '$blah', but isn't that. what might it be?") Chatbots are great for that stuff.

    Chatbots are absolute trash when it comes to needing factual information that cannot be trivially verified. I include the various "deep research" tools -- they are useless, except maybe as a starting point. For every problem I've given them, they've just been wrong. Not even close. The people who rely on these tools, it seems to me, are the same sort of folks who read newspaper headlines and Gartner 'reasearch reports' and accept the conclusions at face value.

    For anything else, it's just easier to write a search query. The internet is wrong too, but it's easier for me to cross-validate answers across 10 blue links than to figure it out via socratic method with a robot.

  • by jackgolding on 4/30/25, 2:26 AM

    I tried this but lasted only a day using ChatGPT instead of Google

  • by alganet on 4/30/25, 2:58 AM

    Search got worse, all of the engines. Infected with SEO crap.

    It is a matter of time until LLMs suffer the same fate, all of them. It spares no one.

    Conclusion? Placement optimization strategies stink ass. Whether it is for marketing, militia or entertainment, it sucks.

  • by maxglute on 4/30/25, 7:10 PM

    I find Google Gemini very reserved/careful to the point of being useless as search replacement, i.e. it's very relunctant to list figures/data. I want a basic vibe check for some publically accessible stats and it just wont' do it unless I provide the numbers or yell at it in upper case. It's a very patient customer service bot that I want to take a bat to.

  • by xnx on 4/30/25, 2:24 AM

    Why not use Gemini which is as good or better and has a more recent knowledge cutoff?

  • by stefap2 on 4/30/25, 2:45 AM

    Google now includes a brief AI-generated summary at the top of the page. For most general searches, it's sufficient.

    For more in-depth queries, I use OpenAI or Claude.

    Google remains superior for shopping and finding deals.

  • by nadir_ishiguro on 4/30/25, 2:39 AM

  • by moralestapia on 4/30/25, 2:07 AM

    Indeed, also no reason to go back to Google for me.

    I wish there was a free Gmail alternative (if there's is lmk!).

    Edit: downvotes for expressing an opinion, low.

  • by fastball on 4/30/25, 2:23 AM

    I did this as well for a while, but have actually been impressed with how helpful the Google AI summaries have become. Now I'm back to a hybrid 50% pure LLM, 50% Google approach.

    (and I use Google's Gemini for 50% of my pure LLM requests)