Web search has gotten worse. Maybe it's always been like this and I only just started to notice. In any case, web searches today are poisoned with ads, AI-generated content and SEO. Somewhere within those results you may find your answer or a link to the code you want.

Until they figure out how to do SEO for an AI, or OpenAI opens bidding for embedding ads into its model, replacing my search engine (Startpage) with ChatGPT has yielded a much more pleasant experience using the Internet that has provided straightforward answers to questions far more succinctly than the rambling articles about recipes, gardening or whatnot that are engineered for the highest CTR on the exact words you typed in.

Adding ChatGPT to the url bar is done by by adding a custom search engine and setting it as the default. That way, when you type something in and hit enter you are greeted with ChatGPT helpfully responding directly to your query.

Paired with my Smart Searching across many different sites offering search, I am able to find the resource I need or the answer to my question almost every time without pulling out the tired @g shortcut for a Google search.

Follow the instructions in the above linked article to add a new search engine, specifically for Firefox. If you use Chrome then the instructions are similar but the menu names are different.

This is the query string you're going to add:

https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&temporary-chat=true

temporary-chat=true keeps one-off searches from cluttering my chat history. In addition to asking the model offline, it's possible to use ChatGPT Search (formerly SearchGPT) to essentially Google things for you and summarize them. OpenAI recently opened access to SearchGPT for everyone, even people not signed in. Is can be queried from the URL bar by adding the following query string:

https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&temporary-chat=true&hints=search

I use ChatGPT Search as a drop-in replacement for Google as a tool that I use to find documentation or to research things for this wiki. I used Perplexity before SearchGPT was made generally available. I like it because it provides sources. For equities and cryptocurrencies it has nice graphs. Be warned, even on the nice looking chart the price action's still bad.

Ads are not present right now, but I do not doubt that SearchGPT, and possibly other parts of ChatGPT, will be monetized and spots sold to publishers who are willing to pay for ranking, similar to how the top-most Google result (when you have ad-block disabled) is always an ad. As an LLM it is also prone to mistakes, such as when I look up "Best burger place in Raleigh" and it places Char-grill at #5. Inexcusable behavior.