Bloomberg is reporting on a cohort of “early adopter” customers who are choosing to use “AI Chatbots” for search instead of Google. This certainly matches my own experience - I have probably shifted 50% or more of my search habits over to ChatGPT and Claude. Lots of other folks are using Perplexity and the new web search capabilities of ChatGPT.

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This change definitely requires a big change of habit as that Google search reflex is very strong.

I have rebuilt my search habit around the strengths of the LLM, which is getting directly to the answer rather than surfacing a bunch of “context” which then I have to wade through by hand.

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For example, I asked ChatGPT to recommend 3 highly rated Thai food restaurants in my area of town. It gave me back a great list, including characterizing the vibe and reviews of each restaurant (“Customers love its modern take on Bangkok-style street food”). This is a great example where the traditional Google search is horrible - not just filled with ads and spam, but *page rank* is a poor indicator of current restaurant quality and popularity.

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Whereas with Google I would have searched “best thai near me”, with ChatGPT I am already used to more nuanced and complex questions, so my restaurant search was a lot more in-depth, like “Show me 3 of the best and most popular Thai restaurants on the east side of town”. So I have adjusted to more complex queries knowing that they will generate better answers. 

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Here are some of my other recent ChatGPT queries that replaced a Google query:

• “i want you to research the company <XX>. Tell me when it was founded, who were the founders, what industry is it in, and who are its customers”
• “Which car rental companies are near SFO “
• “Can I transfer points from chase to an airline ?”
• At an Italian restaurant, took a pic of the menu: “Show me pictures of these dishes “

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(Btw, the “generate some images for me” search is just scratching the surface of how we will use multi-modal LLMs in the future.)

All of these returned really good results. And each one started a chat that allowed me to ask clarifying follow ups - another thing you can’t do with Google search. And since those chats are so rich, it makes sense for ChatGPT to keep that list so I can refer back to them easily.

Notably, no one made any *internet* money on my searches. So the review aggregators and “listicle sites” are missing out. But the car rental companies, airlines and restaurants will all still sell me their goods. Which is not to say that folks won’t eventually figure out how to game LLM-based search - I’m sure they will. But it’s a great user experience until then!