Whether I reach for AI or Search depends on two questions. Am I looking for a site or information? If I'm looking for information, how easily can I verify it?

Whether I reach for AI or Search depends on two questions. Am I looking for a site or information? If I'm looking for information, how easily can I verify it? Websites have all kinds of extra context and links to other stuff on them. If I want to learn/discover stuff then they are still the best place to go. For simple informational questions, all of that extra context is noise; asking gpt "what's the name of that cpp function that does xyz" is much faster than having to skim over several search results, click one, wait for 100 JavaScript libraries to load, click no on a cookies popup and then actually read the page to find the information only to realise the post is 15 years old and no longer relevant. There are times where I know exactly what website to go to and where information is on that site and so I prefer that over AI. DDGs bangs are excellent for this: "!cpp std::string" and you are there. Then there's the verifiability thing. Most information I am searching for is code which is trivial to verify: sometimes AI hallucinates a function but the compiler immediately tells me this and the end result is I've wasted 30 seconds which is more than offset by the time saved not scrolling through search. Examples of things that aren't easy to verify: when's this deprecated function going to be removed, how mature is tool xyz. Of course, there's also questions about things that happened after the AI's knowledge cutoff date. I know there are some that can access the internet now but I don't think any are free