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?
For the record, I completely agree that AI can beat Google in the long run. But we aren't there yet.
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.
What I like about about ChatGPT (and friends) is the ability to synthesize knowledge from unrelated bits and pieces in different sources.
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.
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.
Do others use search differently?
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 still use Google, but as others have said, the list of links is just that, a list of links.
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.
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.
There is, of course, some 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.
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.
I use chatgpt to generate code. That's maybe batter than looking at Stackoverflow.
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...