alt Hacker News> One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT.
I use ChatGPT (or Gemini) instead of web searches. You can blame the content and link farms that are top of the search results, and the search engines focusing on advertising instead of search, because we're the product.
Why your friend doesn't know about wikipedia is another matter, if i wanted a generic info page about some topic i'd go directly there. But if i wanted to know if Bob Geldof's hair is blue, I might ask a LLM instead of reading the whole wikipedia page.
I also ask LLMs for introductory info about programming topics i don't know about, because i don't want to go to google and end up on w3schools, geeksforgeeks and crap like that.
I don't really trust LLMs for advanced programming topics, you know, what people pay me for. But they're fine for giving me a function signature or even a small example.
You can use source material instead of LLMs for all of this.
"Is Bob Geldof's hair blue?" -> Search for Bob Geldof -> Look at images of Bob Geldof.
Intro programming topics can be found at the documentation of the website. Your searching query might be "[programming topic] getting started" and usually if it's a package or a tool there will be documentation. If you want good documentation on web dev stuff that isn't w3schools or geeksforgeeks you can use MDN documentation.
Or, if you really want a general overview there's probably a YouTube video about the topic.
Additionally appending "reddit" to a search will give better results than SEO junk. There are always ways to find quality information via search engines.