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They're a direct replacement for most of the ad-filled search queries you might have used Google for before like "Trip ideas for Paris" or "Meal plan ideas". Th

They're a direct replacement for most of the ad-filled search queries you might have used Google for before like "Trip ideas for Paris" or "Meal plan ideas". The best part is that you can ask follow up questions with the same interface, which you can't after clicking onto some random web page match from the search results. Using them for something like "SQL error: <some copy/pasted error>" is much more dicey, but Google is unlikely to get much ad revenue from a query like that anyways. Sure, the use case of "find this page" isn't going away, but I'd be quite scared if I were Google, because the use case where they make the most money is going to be handled by LLMs shortly instead of search.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Totally agree. Somewhat ironically, recently I was playing with plugins with ChatGPT 4 and was testing out some of the "trip ideas" questions. I actually got great results - interesting suggestions that were personalized to what I told it about myself that I wanted - when I used "plain" ChatGPT 4. Then when I turned on the TripAdvisor plugin, the recommendations went totally to shit. It basically just spat back the first 3 items from "Top outdoor things to do in X" from TripAdvisor. No personalization, and I had just mentioned outdoor things as one of the qualities I was looking for, but I listed a bunch of others. Also no "off the beaten path" recommmendations. I mention this because Google essentially operates like the TripAdvisor plugin, and I always just get back "Top X" lists that more often than not seem like SEO spam. I use ChatGPT now pretty much exclusively for those types of questions where I'm not simply trying to find a page on the web.