I have noticed the quality and usefulness of Google results declining for several years. I don’t think it has anything to do with recent AI developments. If any

I have noticed the quality and usefulness of Google results declining for several years. I don’t think it has anything to do with recent AI developments. If anything, this new generation of AI may finally get Google to fix their results or accelerate its death spiral. To me, GPT-4 is a breath of fresh air that directly finds what I am looking for and answers complex questions quite well even if I don’t entirely know how to ask them perfectly. People like to talk about prompt engineering to optimize GPT, but I find I can get good results even with very lazy, sloppy input. On Google, I often have to mess around with quoting certain phrases, using -foo to remove certain types of results, etc. Google is more finicky; you have to adapt to it, because it doesn’t adapt to you. Actually, in many cases Google attempts to adapt to you, but does it poorly, which is worse. Google changes results by location, even if I deny it access to my exact location, and shows barely relevant results from an imprecise location instead of location agnostic results. Google also changes the results based on search history yet it doesn’t really understand how one query is related to the previous query, the way GPT does. There’s also no “New chat” equivalent on Google to start from a fresh slate, short of clearing your browser data. On top of all that, GPT has a paid tier to better align our incentives and avoid ads. Even the free version has no ads for now. It is a better interface by far. The fact that I have to log in to GPT is probably the most annoying thing about it at the moment. It does also hallucinate sometimes and it’s too much of a prude. There are concerns about its power and bias, etc. But it is clearly a step-change in technology. One which seems destined to improve, not get worse, as Google has.