I completed my first week using SearchGPT exclusively as the only search engine I used. I did do a few comparisons with G and Bing, but I always took the SearchGPT Serp first.
Thoughts:
Pro: It is such a breath of fresh air not to have all the visual Serp Noise of Google and Bing. Zero time was spent trying to figure out if this was a spam result (ads) or an ‘honest’ result because all the results are ‘honest’ on SearchGPT.
That in turn helped me find things faster.
Con: Some searches did take awhile to generate. I kept telling myself that since the results took less time to digest, that I was actually saving time. But boy-howdy (as we say down south), you really start to notice that little lag in generating results (Google really trained us plebs well.)
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Pro: Direct answers with Source citations.
Con: No display of URL with result. I was surprised how much I noticed this. When I am looking at a result that says “the sky is blue” I want to see if that came from NASA, NWS, or Bubba’s Gumps Weather Blog.
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Pro: The Interface: Being able to click the ‘link’ tab and get a traditional looking serp is really cool and gives you a ton of info you don’t get on the spammy noise filled Google/Bing Serps. It is so clean
Con: I wish the descriptions for each were a bit longer. They appear to be about 180-200 characters.
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Pro: Default contextual chat interface. Although there is an input limit shorter than ChatGPT, the default mode is to be a Chat interface using “prompts” instead of antiquated “queries”. Whereas with Google I still use queries and expect it to respond in a traditional manner.
Con: It takes a bit to get used to the idea that you can ask a follow up “prompt, question, or query”. In that sense, it was a bit less intuitive that I’d like.
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Pro/Con:
This conversational interface has made me to do much more typing to explain what I am asking SearchGPT to do. With Google/Bing, you bang out a keyword or phrase and expect a result, but with SearchGPT, it is much more nuanced and requires more explicit instructions to get the output you want.
With traditional search, you play a game of whack-a-mole with keywords when researching topics:
1 You search
2 Ingest the Serp
3 Maybe click a bit on a result
1 Go back and refine kw’s
2 Search – refine – etc – ad nauseam
In that process, every time through that loop you are really starting all over. Clearly Google and Bing are trying anything to resolve that process by adding links to PAA, “Open Now”, “Near Me”, and even silly stuff like “Vibe” to click. Obviously, they realize there has been a serious problem with traditional search processes for a very long time.
Pro: SearchGPT and it’s primary conversational interface, you just “keep prompting” within the same search to get the results you want. You never really “start over”. Additionally, scrolling back up to the previous results is totally AWESOME. It cuts time out of the search loop and give context to the result. I so hope they add “history” to the interface.
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Pro: It shines on mobile. Clean – quick – “look ma, no Google Spam”. I was using CoPilot exclusively, but have switched to SearchGPT.
The Con here is all Google. Is there anything worse than using Google/Bing on mobile? It is a joke without an ad filter. 90% useless and getting worse every day. I don’t know how iPhone users with Safari can stand clicking any results – most searches are buried under Google AdWords spam, paywalls, and disgusting ad filled sites. If someone from just 10 years ago were handed an phone to do some searches on Google – they would swear your phone was infected with a virus.
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More to investigate:
- Multimedia. At first blush, I like it, but it is too limited in responses. Bing is still the hands-down king with images. And Google the freshness king. I rarely use images for anything.
- Freshness.Missing:
- Maps – Just buy MapQuest already or give us a OpenStreetMap interface a go.
- GMB/Biz Data – I suppose they could buy a bunch of this from Microsoft, but who knows. It is a glaring – but understandable – omission so far. Small steps first, but SearchGPT is a massive step for OpenAI.
Overall, SearchGPT is a breath of fresh air. If you have not tried it, you should.
