Took me a while to realise I can just type search queries into ChatGPT. e.g. simply "london bridge history" or whatever into the chat and not only get a complete answer, but I can ask it follow-up questions. And it's also personalised for the kinds of responses I want, thanks to the custom instructions setting.

ChatGPT is my primary search engine now. (I just wish it would accept a URL query parameter so it could be launched straight from the browser address bar.)

This is funny, because I find it much less cumbersome to type a few search terms into a search engine and explore the links it spits out.

Agreed except ChatGPT (3.5 at least, haven't tried 4) is unable to provide primary sources for its results. At least when I tried, it just provided hallucinated urls

who would have thought that few years ago, just goes to show that a Giant like Google is also susceptible when they stop innovating. The real battle is going to be fought between these two as Google's business is majorly dependent on search ads.

It rather created new hybrid search engines, like perplexity and phind.

True. Although the training is on a snapshot of websites, including q&a like stackoverflow. If these were replaced too, where are we heading? We'll have to wait and see. One concern would be centralization/ lack of options and diversity. Stackoverflow started rolling AI on its own, despite the controversial way it did (dismissing long time contributors); it might be correctly following the trend.