Ask HN: Do You Google Less? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You Google Less?

8 pointscorentin8810 comments

Google used to be my go to place whenever I needed to search for something online. But quite recently I’ve found myself using more and more ChatGPT & co in my day to day life as a developer.

While I still use Google a lot, I believe my usage has decreased by 50% in the past few months. ChatGPT has covered the needs and feels even better now with specific queries, such as « help me write an SQL query », or advanced ones.

Sometimes I start with Google (old habit) only to open ChatGPT a few moments later as the SERP doesn’t fit my needs.

Just wondering if you have the same feeling?

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I use Google probably ~70% less these days, and mainly just to validate a suspected ChatGPT hallucination by trying to find a source – and even then, it's mostly Scholar and Images and `filetype:pdf` that's helpful. The default, general search is really hard to use these days. Google's AI up top is also both extremely annoying (I had to use a Chrome plugin to disable it) and very bad compared to the alternatives. I haven't seen it give a correct answer yet.

For me, ChatGPT has overall greater accuracy (and MUCH greater precision) than Google, especially for longer, complex queries. It is so good at understanding language that even if the results contain hallucinations, I can ask it to elaborate its reasoning with follow-ups and thereby get clues to further investigate, something that was really hard to do with Google because it sucks at parsing and its results are 90% spam.

Google has felt like like an adversarial system for a years now, where I'm not actually the user but the enemy, and it has long since stopped delivering quality results (even with adblock). It has maliciously bad UX. By contrast, ChatGPT feels immature but helpful, and getting better every year.

ChatGPT and Claude have replaced 90% of my work-related Google searches ("how do I do X in [language]?" etc.) The only thing I still use Google for is when I'm looking for a specific website/blogpost/video/whatever, or if it's for something localised that AI isn't good for (e.g. "phone repair in [town]")

I do, and I think that's understating it; I think people wikipedia less. When I first used it, I asked for book recommendations on a specific niche -- it just made up entries, but this version now gives real titles; its an astonishing recommendation engine for music, and other domains.

I avoid ChatGPT, because I want context around whatever I'm looking up, but I also use Google less - I switched to DuckDuckGo and Kagi. Google search seems to have gone off beginning maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Ads at the top of the search, plus SEO BS content farm swill predominating.

That’s likely due to the improvements made to the AI models. I don’t think ChatGPT 3 could have made me changes my search habit. But recent models are really impressive now.

Also, I know you shouldn’t trust what the AI says, but you shouldn’t trust either what the Internet says.

I use searchGPT more than google but I use both much more rarely than before ChatGPT entered the scene, because the various LLMs cover a lot of basic knowledge and they have the ability to filter down recent preprints and papers to my needs.

I stopped using Google a couple of years ago simply because Google search stopped working very well for me. I didn't switch to an LLM, though, but to a search engine that works much better for me.

The paid search engine https://kagi.com/ has been giving me better than google results for some time now.

Honestly? No. Not really. But I think that's a reflection of the kinds of things I search for and how/why I search. I'm rarely looking for an answer to a specific question (the kind of thing I might go to Gemini or ChatGPT for), but am typically just using Google as a short-cut to avoid having to memorize web addresses. It's like a higher layer above DNS. I just type a vague description of the site I want to go to in my browser's URL bar, let the Google search execute, and then click the link.

So yes, that implies that I typically browse by going mostly to sites that I already know I want to visit. And the handful of things that I do search for that are in "simple question" form, are things that Google does a pretty good job of answering anyway.

I do use LLM's (I pay for both Gemini and ChatGPT and run an Ollama server locally, just to illustrate) but that hasn't really affected the way I use Google.

I don't take anything an AI says seriously, but I have been a contented user of DuckDuckGo for over a decade. I can't remember when I last used `!g` to invoke Google search; it hasn't been worth the trouble for a long time.

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