I've been using ChatGPT and Perplexity with GPT4 as my replacement for DDG and Google. I never thought the day would come when I thought Google Search was going to be superseded. It's crazy times to me.
If some company makes a less sanitized but equally capable version of GPT4 then I could see it replacing Google.
But for now you must keep your searches to a very limited, sanitized, corporate, non-copyright infringing, non-adult set of knowledge. And it's impossible to know what that will be beforehand, which makes using the tools very frustrating.
For example, try searching for anything medical related. Even if you're clear that you not looking for medical advice, you're just looking for info, it won't give it (sorry, as an AI I can't give medical advice). I imagine this is very frustrating for medical students.
And yes, I'm sure that I could coerce it into responding. Pretend your my grandmother telling me about her old medical recipes or some such. But that's still too annoying to do as anything except for testing the boundaries of the tool.
Simply asking it, “What would you tell a medical student…” works around this. I can’t imagine how or why they’re bothering with this when a simple disclaimer would probably protect them legally. WebMD seems to do just fine.
Yeah but my point is that it's not a complete search tool while it makes you jump through hoops of indirectly asking "hypothetical" questions.
It needs to directly answer all the questions that are given to it. If it must finish out the post with a disclaimer like "I am not a doctor/lawyer, this is not medical/legal advice" or whatever, that's fine.
