alt Hacker News> My best guess is it's because they finally have a real competitor in ChatGPT.
ChatGPT doesn't even fulfill the same function, to say nothing about the poor reliability inherent to the way it works. In no sense is it a real competitor to Google.
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stcroixx • last Thursday at 9:20 PM
All the developers I work with have stopped using Google search entirely in favor of ChatGPT. Even my wife prefers it after seeing how bad googles results are and full of ads.
This is absolutely not my experience. My googlefu has gone to shit. I can no longer have some sense for what I’m looking for and find it. Something I know exists, I just don’t know the terms of art to pull up the wealth of knowledge. I used to be able to do a half dozen searches, and finally on page 4 or 5 finally find some clues as to the terms I need. Now, there is no page 4… like ever. Clearly not many people were going past page 3 so they stopped serving that content.
Now I use chatgpt for these kinds of queries, and it feels like using google circa 2004.
I know this is a small edge case, and ultimately I need to use google to crosscheck, but it hints at the rot that has taken over at google, and represents a potential shift. If I could get good reference links from chatgpt, I may be able to stop using google for an increasing number of my queries.