If you define advertisements as quality information google definitely wins out. I wouldn’t use either to learn something unless you’re interested in buying what their advertisers and their SEO results are selling.
To some degree, I'm probably at least curious about what SEOs are selling. If it's art, it probably popular and I'll want to know what it is, and if it's tech, people with money for SEO are often also the ones with money for innovation.
I don't usually buy stuff in ads(Actually, I rarely buy anything nonessential without thinking for a week about it), but Google's results usually are interesting, if a bit creepy and echo chambery.
I don't just use Google to learn things and accept the first results, but I do use it as a starting point.
That’s how I use chatGBT to learn. It’s rarely precisely correct but it’s answers are often basically right or direct me to a lot of concepts to investigate further. For instance I want to build a TEC based CO2 freezing chamber but need a low temperature TEC. I asked it about what TEC materials operate at low temperature. It gave me 10 different TEC semiconductors with operating temperatures, which were sometimes right. I then used Kagi (seriously, google?) to find literature. Using the two together - one to get a rough outline of the domain explained in simple and concise language and the other to retrieve information.
IR systems lack the bootstrapping phase - unless you know precisely what you want to learn you’ll end up in SEO hell sifting through loosely related garbage produced by algorithms to include as many relevant terms but zero insightful knowledge. I think for learning chatGPT is great for bootstrapping, then I turn to IR to refine and get accurate information.
