Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and for many years, it was my go-to method of finding information online. However, I rarely use Google anymore; there are plenty of reasons why searching using ChatGPT is superior.
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ChatGPT Gives Answers Rather Than Links
A key benefit of using ChatGPT to search is that an AI chatbot will give you answers, rather than web links. If you want to find something using a search engine, you usually need to enter a query, open a link that looks useful, and then scour that web page for the information you need.
ChatGPT does all the hard work for you by finding an appropriate website, extracting the information that you need, and presenting it in an easily digestible format.
6
You Get Answers From Multiple Sources
A major flaw with Google and other search engines is that you can only access one result at a time. There might be five useful results on the first page, each of which has some unique useful information related to your query that isn’t found on the other pages.
ChatGPT can look for information from multiple websites and collate what it finds into a single response with all the useful information combined. You even get a list of sources so that you can find where each of the pieces of information came from.
5
ChatGPT Doesn’t Bombard You With Ads
Google is a strong example of how most online services decline over time. It says all you need to know when a company feels it has to remove its former motto of “Don’t be evil” because, well, you can figure out why.
When Google first launched, it was an honest-to-goodness search engine without a single ad in sight that would serve results that matched your query. It only took two years, however, for the first ads to start to appear. It’s reached the point now where it feels like Google will actively try to alter what you’re searching for to give less helpful but more lucrative results.
ChatGPT (for now) isn’t plagued with advertising. If you use ChatGPT to find information, you get the information you want without anyone trying to sell you anything. Although, of course, it’s almost inevitable that this is going to change eventually.
4
ChatGPT Can Give Personalized Results
This is another really useful benefit of using ChatGPT that search engines just can’t match. You can add your preferences to ChatGPT’s memory, and when you search, ChatGPT can use your preferences to give the types of results that you want and omit those that you don’t. For example, ChatGPT knows the rough ages of my kids, so when I’m searching for birthday present ideas, I don’t have to specify what age range to search for.
You can even create projects in ChatGPT that have their own custom instructions. You can use these to give ChatGPT a list of sources that it should use when finding information, and any chats within that project will always search using your preferred sources.
3
You Can Use ChatGPT For Comparisons
Comparisons are really helpful when you’re thinking about buying a product. Many tech websites offer useful comparisons of popular products to help you decide which is the best one to go for. The trouble is that Google can only return these types of comparisons if someone has actually written and published them.
If you want to compare the specs of the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Switch, for example, then you’re out of luck, as no one has written an article comparing the two. This isn’t a problem for ChatGPT, however. Just ask it to compare two products, and it can find the relevant information and create a comparison of its own, even generating tables of key specs side by side.
While ChatGPT can be useful for comparing products, making a purchasing decision based solely on the advice of an AI chatbot is probably not the most sensible choice, since information is not always accurate.
2
Your Searches Aren’t Being Tracked
Google doesn’t just make money out of your web searches through ads and sponsored links. It also tracks your use of the search engine so that it can pester you with targeted ads. Google will track the things you search for, the sites you visit, your YouTube viewing history, and even where you are when you use Google products, so that when you search for laptops you suddenly find ads for laptops wherever you turn.
ChatGPT doesn’t track you in the same way, although it does retain a lot of information about you, including your prompts, account information, and anything you upload to ChatGPT. However, that information isn’t currently being used to target you with ads. Whether that changes in the future remains to be seen, but for now searching with ChatGPT is less intrusive than doing so with Google.
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ChatGPT Can Answer Queries That Google Can’t
This is probably the biggest reason why I tend to use ChatGPT for search instead of traditional search engines such as Google. Thanks to the natural language processing that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT use, they are able to provide answers to queries that Google and others simply cannot handle.
Google has always struggled when you can’t remember the key information you needed for a query. If you Google “blonde actress from Heroes not the cheerleader,” all the results are for Hayden Panettiere, who played the cheerleader in Heroes and is precisely the person you’re not looking for.
Ask ChatGPT the same thing, and it will respond with Ali Larter, who is exactly the person I was thinking of. ChatGPT understands that you don’t mean Hayden Panettiere and gives the most likely blonde actress from the remaining cast. Even if you include a typo, ChatGPT can still figure out what you mean.
Google has been the dominant search engine for so long that it’s become a verb in its own right. However, there are plenty of reasons why it makes more sense to use ChatGPT to search for information from the web. These days, I almost always turn to ChatGPT instead of Google, although ChatGPT is by no means superior to searching with other AI chatbots. It’s simply the one I have a subscription to.
