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?
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.