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Comment by eshack94 | Hacker News Reader

I like how they silently removed the web browsing (Bing browsing) chat feature after first having it disabled for several months.

A proper notice about them removing the feature would've been nice. Maybe I missed it (someone please correct me if wrong), but the last I heard officially it was temporarily disabled while they fix something. Next thing I know, it's completely gone from the platform without another peep.

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I currently have Browsing with Bing enabled as a plug-in on my account. It went away for months, but it just randomly came back about a week or 2 ago!

Yes, that was a disappointment, and I agree it looks like they aren't going to re-enable it anytime soon. However I find that Perplexity AI does a better job of using web search than ChatGPT ever did, and I use it more than ChatGPT for that reason.

Perplexity has gone downhill a lot since its initial rollout. Anecdotally, from my experience as a non-paying user of the service.

give vello.ai a try

vello.ai is very, very slow. I used it for web searching but waiting (sometimes) more than 30 seconds for a simple queries is unacceptable

it is optimized for more in depth research rather than quick shallow answers, so a different use case.

Thanks I'll check it out. Are there other similar sites you like?

Just made an account to say that I currently have this feature. It was gone for a few months but it came back to me I think this past week. Not as a plugin, either, it is its own “model” to select.

Since so many others including myself don't see it, I guess that means it is getting a slow rollout which they are being extra cautious with this time.

Hey, thanks for the info! I did not know about this, but this is actually good to hear. I'll keep an eye open for it. Are you using ChatGPT or the API? Did you have to take any action to get it to reappear, or is it just a slow rollout as they re-enable?

Agreed. You’re now dependent on a third party plugin.

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