SearchGPT Changed How I Surf the Web Forever.

I said goodbye to Google, and you can too. Learn how to use SearchGPT, and transform the way you work.

This isn’t clickbait. I am a full believer in SearchGPT, and I’m going to tell you why. This article is simultaneously a manifesto for why you should start using SearchGPT and a comprehensive guide on how to use it optimally.

Whether you’re a newcomer to SearchGPT, have dabbled a little bit, or are already an advanced user, I guarantee you will find something useful here. This article is a bit of a doozy, but it might be the most time-saving improvement you can make to your workflow in 2024.

Without further ado, let’s take a peek at some of the primary reasons I love SearchGPT so much.

The Top 3 Benefits of SearchGPT

1. Ultra-Fast Semantic Search

You can search for literally anything with search GPT. In fact, in my side-by-side test, it can be up to 10x faster than a standard Google Search rabbit hole.

For example, the other day, I remembered a boot brand I saw a while ago that I wanted to explore. I knew some details about the brand, but it was hard to put into a single search. Here’s what I knew:

• It’s a single-name brand (i.e., ‘Jim’s Boots’ or similar)
• The boots are pretty expensive but high-quality
• The boots are handmade
• They are Goodyear Welted Soles
• They are an American Brand (maybe)
• They were highly regarded by the community of a boot Subreddit

It was one of those situations where if I had seen it, I would have remembered it; it was teetering on the tip of my tongue. So, I decided to do a little test. I compared SearchGPT and Google directly. I set a timer and started searching with Google first.

After finding nothing on the shopping page (searching “handmade American Goodyear welted boots” to no avail), I started scrolling and scrolling. After the first 30 results, I again found nothing.

I transitioned to inserting “Reddit” at the end of my search. The first two threads that came up yielded nothing, but then I found it. There was a huge post overviewing the best boot brands for given price points, and I began skimming down the extensive list, searching for the brand. After a minute, I found it: Nicks Boots.

My total search time? 4:37.

I set a new timer, opened up SearchGPT, and typed in a prompt about what I knew about this brand. It took me about 20 seconds to write out the prompt. Here are the results:

Boom. There it is, coming in at number 7. This was a whopping 13x faster than Google search. Do I have to convince you of its speed any more?

2. Quickly Understanding the Certain Parts of a Concept

If you need to search the internet to learn more about something, there’s a chance you’ll probably end up on Wikipedia, or you might read the suggested snippet from Google. While both are a great resource, there is often a lot of information about the subject that may distract you from your root goal. With SearchGPT, you can get a quick overview, narrow down your understanding with follow-up questions, and achieve your knowledge goal faster.

For example, let’s say we’re a total layperson who wants to understand how a wind turbine converts wind into energy.

For a traditional search flow, we’d likely search “wind turbine” or “how does a wind turbine work.” Let’s see the Google search results of this:

After this, we now understand the gist of the wind turbine. However, at the same time, we know nothing. In order to form an actual understanding, we must fall into a rabbit hole. So, you’d likely search about the actual inner workings of an electric generator next. Then, you’d have to do another search, narrowing it down to wind turbine generators and synthesizing information from there.

This process works, butit’s so inefficient.

With SearchGPT, we can formulate our knowledge base more quickly and intuitively. It’s as if we’re speaking with a wind turbine expert. Here’s a sample flow:

Now, we can pick from one of these components to quickly understand the subject on a deeper level.

At any point, we can click on the links provided to read from the direct source, and our chat remains intact. This is the fastest way I’ve found to learn more about something, all without fear of AI hallucinations (mostly).

3. Say Goodbye to Your Tab Woes

With SearchGPT, tabs are essentially obsolete. No more messing around with multiple windows of Chrome, each with several dozen tabs. No more losing your multi-day research progress from an unexpected computer restart, or wishing you could bring up a search rabbit hole from months prior.

SearchGPT collects all your research in one place. It’s easy to navigate, and you have an infinite history of your searches.

Let’s say that you’ve been using SearchGPT for a few months. You might remember a little stint of research you did on online ad remarketing. Well, how can you find it? With the trusty ChatGPT search bar, we can find the exact chat super quickly and begin right where we left off:

As you can see, it’s quick and easy to navigate chats, click on sources, and read deeper on any subject. You can quickly navigate to certain sections of the chat (if you have a super long chat) by keying “ctrl+f” and searching the page for keywords.

Those are my top 3 benefits of SearchGPT, but there are many more.

Let’s transition to the next and most crucial section of this article: how to use SearchGPT optimally.

SearchGPT Quickstart

If you already know how to start using SearchGPT, please skip to the next section.

There are three ways to start using SearchGPT:

1. SearchGPT in Chat — Open a normal GPT-4o Chat, and click the search icon:

This way, every prompt you type into the chat bar will invoke a web search. It’ll return its response, along with sources like so:

2. SearchGPT Direct — Navigate to this link: https://chatgpt.com/search and start searching:

You can open up sources by clicking the link icon on the left, and you can also view more media by clicking the image icon.

3. Switch your default search engine to SearchGPT using the Chrome Extension — Navigate to this link to add the extension to Chrome.

The Chrome Extension redirects to SearchGPT after every query you type into the search bar. While I don’t necessarily recommend doing this (Google still has its place for some things as I’ll discuss later), feel free to try it out and see how it works for you.

While each of the methods of using ChatGPT is valid, I personally prefer simply using it within the normal ChatGPT interface (option 1). For that reason, most of this article will focus on Option 1.

Understanding the Art of Internet Search

Before we jump into the advanced SearchGPT strategies I promised, we must understand what search is. Searching the internet is actually quite a nuanced subject. Even if you’ve never consciously thought about it, you have several internet search pathways ingrained in your head. You need to understand how SearchGPT can help (or not) with each one of these paths.

The 7 Paths of Internet Search

Within the field of Internet Search, there many general pathways that encompass most activities. Here is a brief overview of each of them:

1. Navigational Searching: When you want to quickly reach a specific website, you search for it by name or brand (e.g., “Amazon” or “Facebook login”).
2. Informational Searching (Direct and Indirect): When you’re looking to learn about a topic or find an answer, you use open-ended queries (Direct: “What is climate change?” Indirect: “Facts about climate change”).
3. Transactional Searching: When you’re ready to make a purchase or sign up for something, you search with intent to complete an action (e.g., “buy iPhone 15” or “sign up for medium”).
4. Commercial Investigation: When you’re comparing products or services before a purchase, you search with keywords like “best” or “top” (e.g., “best laptops for students” or “top laptops 2024”).
5. Refinement and Iterative Searching: When you refine your search multiple times to get closer to what you need, you adjust keywords and phrasing (e.g., “GDPR rules” to “EU data privacy for businesses”). This is the basis for most “search rabbit holes”
6. Longitudinal Searching: When you’re doing extended research over multiple tabs and sessions, you might leave open tabs for later reference and continue refining your search each time (e.g., when you’re comparing potential flight itineraries to one another).
7. Known-Item Searching: When you’re looking for specific content you know exists, you search with titles, names, or unique details (e.g., “NY Times remote work article by Jane Doe”). This is similar to navigational but more specific.

Other Paths of Internet Search (My Findings)

I’ve observed a few other pathways that I’m sure many of you will be familiar with. While these are not formally recognized, I feel it’s worth it to cover them here:

8. Human Validation Searching: When you specifically seek out real people’s opinions on a subject (e.g., adding “Reddit” to the end of a search query).

9. Anti-SEO Searching: Similar to informational searching, but when you are looking for information from a truly reputable source, not one that has the best SEO tactics but lacks legitimate info (e.g., scrolling frustratedly past unknown websites before you find one that you trust).

10. SOS Searching: Scouring the web for help from anyone on any forum (no matter how obscure) who has the same problem as you (e.g., searching “Samsung TV won’t turn on when HMDI 1 is plugged in”).

11. Anti-Confirmation Bias Searching: When you’re having a debate with your buddies, so you must search the most non-biased terms possible (e.g., proving your argument correct while satisfying the viewpoint of your fellow debater).

12. Known Unknown Searching: When you know some aspects about the thing you are looking up, but are unsure of exactly how to find it (e.g., searching “There’s this one old youtube video of a kid freaking out about losing some video game, and there’s a whole series of videos about them…”)

Now that you’re familiar with the different types of search, we can finally take a deep dive into how SearchGPT can help with each one. Buckle up!

SearchGPT Strategy— The Nitty Gritty

This section breaks down the pros and cons of SearchGPT for each search pathway I presented above. Each subsection comes equipped with examples, suggestions, and tips to optimize how you use SearchGPT. Let’s get started!

SearchGPT for Navigational and Known Item Searching

To put things bluntly, SearchGPT isn’t going to help us much here. There’s really no efficiency gain from typing “medium” into Google versus typing it into SearchGPT. However, some webpages can be difficult to access, especially if you forgot to bookmark them. This is where SearchGPT shines.

Here’s a quick example. Sometimes I find it difficult to access my API account information for certain sites. Let’s take my Perplexity AI API account. It takes me forever to navigate to this page, and I’ve been remiss in bookmarking it. However, with SearchGPT, I can find it right away:

Tips for SearchGPT Navigational Searching:

• Be detailed in what you’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to just write it out directly
• If you aren’t finding what you’re looking for, ask GPT to ask you clarifying questions about your query so it can better assist you
• For known item searching (i.e. Jordan Gibbs Medium Article about automated prompt engineering) it can be helpful, but once again, it has no real advantage over Google.

This is one of the least impactful ways to use SearchGPT, but it can still be useful from time-to-time.

SearchGPT for Informational Searching (Direct and Indirect)

SeachGPT is excellent for accessing specific things or aggregating up-to-date information quickly. Good old ChatGPT (without Search) has the ever-infuriating knowledge cutoff. However, we can now directly ask it things that it doesn’t “know about” because it can find it through the internet. We can also massively reduce hallucinations, so we can trust it a lot more! Just make sure you always check its sources for important information :)

As a demonstration, let’s say I want to investigate some recent advancements to a data app platform I like to use, Streamlit:

Now, I can easily allow ChatGPT to access these up-to-date docs, so it can write code for me using the brand-new features.

That’s just one example of how SearchGPT improves Informational Search, but here are some more helpful tips and tricks.

Tips for SearchGPT Informational Searching (Direct):

• Always mention the current year or “today” if you want up-to-date information
• You can use the prompt “please examine many sources and aggregate the information from all of them” to aggregate information about a certain subject. Here’s a sample:

• Try a follow-up prompt if the first response isn’t recent enough or specific enough
• Treat the search process like a conversation with an expert (don’t be afraid to just write whatever comes to mind)
• You can ask it to “deep dive” on a specific source by calling it out specifically:

• Insert this prompt: “List some potential follow-up questions for me after you respond” if you want to have a guided search experience
• Don’t be afraid to force it to reference a source. Sometimes, it can resist a little bit and fall back on its existing knowledge. You can do this simply by stating: “You must reference a source for every point you bring up no matter what”

Indirect informational searching (i.e., searching without a goal in mind) is excellent with SearchGPT. Here are some tips.

Tips for SearchGPT Informational Searching (Indirect):

Note: this section also covers “Refinement and Iterative Searching”, “Longitudinal Searching”, and “Known Unknown Searching” as mentioned above.

• Ask it to create a learning outline for you to follow so you can incrementally learn what you need to learn in order to understand a concept at large
• Prep the session by requesting that it ask you clarifying questions before you begin your search so you can narrow down what you want to look for faster. Use the prompt: “Before you begin, please ask me clarifying questions about my learning goals.” Here’s an example of it in action:

• Ask it to recommend YouTube videos. SearchGPT can find highly relevant videos about your requests, so your learning experience can be multimedia:

• Ask it to recommend photos, diagrams, and graphs for visual aids:

• Another approach is what I call “single-source branching,” where you ask SearchGPT to summarize a single source (that you trust and contains a full overview of a subject) and then branch out from there:

• To take an even deeper dive, and to avoid “poisoning” GPT’s context window, I recommend opening a new chat if you want to discuss something very specific:

• You can always search your recent chats in the search bar, so you’ll never lose any of your history!

Informational search with SearchGPT is incredible, and I can’t get enough of it. I’ve been so excited to speed up my learning trajectory on everything I want to learn about!

SearchGPT for Transactional and Commercial Investigation Searching

Yes, you can use SearchGPT to find places to sign up for or purchase services and products. While this isn’t necessarily any faster or better than Google, it does have some exciting features, such as this map:

You can also find new places to consume content:

The scope of this is pretty limited in SearchGPT, so this might be a small win for Google :) However, it’s still helpful for quickly getting pointed to the right place!

You can also shop for products with SearchGPT. However, it’s not in the way you’d expect. Don’t think that ChatGPT can point you to exact product links (it can, but it often hallucinates); instead, think of it as a product comparison tool.

Here’s a sample:

It now points me to brands that make sweaters to my liking: crewneck, chunky, oversized, and earth-tone colored:

Remember earlier how I mentioned that many people do what I call “human validation searching?

Unfortunately, SearchGPT can’t seem to access many forums, such as Reddit. While it does have a lot of Reddit in its training data, it cannot access modern threads. That’s one huge limitation of SearchGPT for now!

SearchGPT for Anti-SEO Searching

Anti-SEO article searching is a new trend that I’ve seen emerging. At its core, it’s essentially a filter inside our brains that tries to find websites that we have interacted with positively before or sources that we know are generally trustable. Here’s how SearchGPT can help with that:

This quick process can erase a lot of heartache from your research.

Tips for Anti-SEO Searching

• Use this prompt to pre-filter: “I only want reputable sources. Give me a list of potential sources, and I’ll choose the ones I want to hear from.”
• Another way to do this is to say, “Do not output anything from a source that is not well known”

SearchGPT for SOS Searching

SOS (Save Our Souls) Searching is a fun one. With Google, you have the innate desire to write out exactly what you’re experiencing, but you know you can’t. With SearchGPT, you can write a stream-of-consciousness report of your situation, and it can articulate your searches into an intelligent stream that will locate people who have had your issue before you much faster. Here is an example:

Now, I can narrow down the problem from its list of potential solutions at the bottom:

This has already helped me in the past couple of weeks, and I couldn’t be happier with its performance.

Tips for SOS Searching with SearchGPT:

• Use this prompt to narrow it down to real human accounts of the problem: “Find some accounts of people with similar issues and output an overview to me”
• Use this prompt if it is outputting overly general advice: “I need highly specific cases that match this scenario exactly”
• Don’t be afraid to be super detailed; write several paragraphs if need be outlining the history of the problem. SearchGPT can sort through the noise

SearchGPT for Anti-Confirmation Bias Searching

This is a perfect use case for SearchGPT when you’re deep in a debate with a friend, preparing for one, or just learning about a controversial topic in general. This approach allows you to see more sides of the issue at once, so you can add some nuance to your viewpoints. Here’s a sample:

The response shows all 3 viewpoints, with assorted arguments for each:

Tips for Anti-Confirmation Bias Searching:

• Try the three viewpoint approach: “Search the web for overviews of [INSERT SUBJECT] and its pros and cons, from each of these 3 viewpoints: 1. Supporter 2. Critic 3. Neutral View”
• Use neutral language to begin with. For example, instead of searching “why are added sugars less healthy than natural ones” type “overview of the differences and similarities in health effects of natural and added sugars.” SearchGPT is helpful here because it can aggregate the opinions of a variety of sources
• Ensure that it uses multiple sources (as all sources have at least some bias, so this will hopefully flatten that out a bit)

Prompting and General Tips for SearchGPT

Now that we’ve gone through the deeper dive into the types of searching you can do with SearchGPT, here are some more general and prompt engineering tips I recommend you use. Many of these have been mentioned earlier, but this is a useful summary.

The Do’s of SearchGPT

• Request that it use many sources — “Please examine a wide variety of sources”
• Create a guided pathway with SearchGPT— “List some potential follow-up questions for me after you respond”
• Use specific dates in your requests — “As of today”, “as of 2024”, or “in 1983”
• If SearchGPT doesn’t come back with any sources, open a new chat and insert “search the web” at the end of your prompt
• Open a new chat after you’ve exchanged more than 20 or so messages, you don’t want its context window getting too full
• Be verbose — the more context GPT has for your request, the better

The Don’ts of SearchGPT

• Don’t be vague (e.g., “new housing crisis 2024” or “cool sports cars 2024”). This can be fixed with this prompt: “ask me some clarifying questions about my request that I will answer before you begin”
• DO NOT take something as gospel without checking the source; hallucinations are still possible. You can always say “verify this information with another, different source”
• Do not ask for a specific opinion; it will tell you what you want to hear. Please ensure your prompts are general and open
• Don’t be afraid to ask “too much” of SearchGPT. There are capabilities it has that I haven’t even discovered yet, and asking a lot of it is precisely how to uncover them

That’s all, folks. I hope this convinces you to at least try integrating SearchGPT into your workflow. It’s transformed my day-to-day in many ways and I bet it will for you too.

Thanks for reading!

-Jordan