I have been using recently Anthropic’s (Claude) Fable and Opus at work, and OpenAI’s GPT for hobby projects. This is not about that, though, but instead about how my use of the Internet search engines has evolved over time.
I hear there are number of people who use only chatbots for searching the internet these days. While it is actually very tempting (one chat window, all your questions answered), in practice it does not work out too well.
My search engine usage history
Dark ages searching without ‘AI’
I think Alta Vista was the first really usable search engine I used long time ago. Subsequently Google was it, but at some point years ago the ‘don’t be evil’ was dropped and I also dropped my use of pretty much all Google services for personal use. I have never been primary GMail user, but I used the search engine and some services they subsequently killed (RSS reader..) and enshittified (youtube and its ad scheme).
For the last couple of years I have mainly used DuckDuckGo as a search engine - at least until the last year.
First AI based attempt: Perplexity (2024-2026)
I started flirting with the different AI search options more and more, starting with Perplexity (which is pretty convenient, and I like the fact that it really provides you with links so you can double check what the AI summarized). I think I played with it first in late 2024, and 2025 was its golden year in terms of usage for me.
I think I like the product still, but sometime this spring/summer (2026) they seem to have enshittified the free version (limited number of requests per time window) enough for me to give up on using it. While I do not mind technically paying for services I rely on, I try to avoid it while it is possible, and just paying for search feels bit too specific.
My current default: ChatGPT (2026+)
ChatGPT actually seems to have reasonably good web searching. While it does not always return all the links to the content it deduces the results from, and it attempts to retain you as an user longer than I might like (I dislike built-in information displays - external links are what Internet is about after all), it still seems like the best option I have at my disposal right now. (And it is ‘free’ as I pay for the subscription also for coding purposes..)
Unfortunately it does not seem to be quite foolproof - for example, during recent Brussels trip, I asked it for location of the oldest Neuhaus chocolate shop in town. I had actually seen the entry in Lonely Planet guidebook earlier so I had vague idea of what I was looking for. ChatGPT confidently gave me directions to a store of that chain, but it was definitely not the oldest/original one. This led to around kilometer of bonus walking, which was fine, but it drove home the point that I trust the LLMs more than I should these days.
What I would like to actually use
Current status quo in ‘AI’ search is pretty far from what I am happy with. I am pretty sure I am leaving traces over all sorts of systems with my current searches, and while they are not that interesting searches, ideally I’d rather keep my helpers really local. Also, they are black boxes that cannot be improved much by me.
Due to that, I think at some point I will look harder at some agentic solutions (ideally local ones) tied to dumb search engines. Unfortunately crawling the internet at scale requires substantial resources and that forces me to use some external service anyway, it would be perhaps still better than what I am using now.