Why pay for a search engine

I would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly. I think search engines are a dead technology pretty quickly and the entire ecosystem will die in the next 2-3 years.

ChatGPT answers range from completely correct to deranged God-awful wrong, which means I have to use a regular search engine to verify the answers for anything remotely complex. Relying entirely on generative models for information is asking for trouble. Especially because the wrong answers often "look" correct/plausible.

There are lots of use cases when you want references to reliable sources written by real people instead of AI slop. Science, law, technical documentation, etc. If you ask an LLM for the sources, it is happy to generate bogus citations for false claims, and the only way to verify the answer is by using the good old web search. I hope real search engines never die, only those that turn to AI slop like Google.

> would rather pay $20/month for ChatGPT and ask it questions directly

Kagi integrates GPT 4 and other LLMs, as well as its own Quick Answer product. The Quick Answer product is 9 times out of 10 superior to any of the pre-trained LLMs. Mostly because it's accessing live information.

Put another way, I'd love to go head to head with a competitor who relies on ChatGPT for their queries.

If you’re using chatGPT, you can add a prompt (I’ve set it in my rules) to “fact check from other websites” when I’m asking it things I’m not an expert in. It then provides some links which I then open up. I’ve found that to be a lot more efficient than searching from google straight up especially with very specific questions I sometimes query.

Half the websites it shows are those I wouldn’t have found on google and are relatively high signal for what I’m looking for (including very niche blogs from experts from the field).