Comment by liampulles
3 hours ago
Google's Search and its AI result can alternatively help or hinder me, I find.
If I'm looking for a relatively straightforward and simple piece of information quickly (e.g. "wooden arch mirror stores linden") then the AI summary can be useful, because I don't need more than surface level info.
If I intend to analyze and understand something (e.g. "developer API issues Zoho Thrive"), then the AI summary and the general degradation in the quality of search results from Google really hinder me. I have to work to avoid a lazy and low value answer, whereas what I really want to do is go through various actual websites and reflect on them to gain insight.
I feel like the second scenario was never good with Google. You had to go through several search results describing other problems, and there was a high chance you still didn't find anything relating to yours; and then, it wasn't guaranteed that a years-old problem got fixed.
If I have an issue with my Mac, seeing an Apple Discussions result at the top readies me for disappointment.
Meanwhile, I've found a normal chat with current ChatGPT to be very helpful, as long as it isn't about itself or other OpenAI products.
I find it to be a fundamental hinderance as they use a cheap model. The cheap model gets confused based on conflicting reddit threads and then I get a wrong answer.
It's better to just ask codex to do the search for me, but this is much slower - but increasingly my go to. I wish there was a fast search api codex could hook into to answer internet questions faster.