I learned to troubleshoot furnaces late one cold night in 2004 using Google, while a worried wife and a couple of sleeping kids loomed over me like a dark cloud. I learned what thermocouples are, what they do, how they work, and how to test them; all of which was new to me. A few hours later I bought one from the Ace Hardware a few blocks away and fixed the furnace with confidence.

And that was awesome. Thanks, Google! :)

I don't know where the change happened. It certainly wasn't overnight.

Where Google used to be magical and other search engines quickly improved, it all kind of turned into shit.

It really seems that I was getting better, more-direct results from Altavista 30 years ago than I do with top-flight search engines today. (That's a deliberately low bar, chosen because Altavista wasn't even intended to be "good" back then. I mean, it started as just as a side project at DEC to demonstrate that their Alpha hardware was able to index the entire World Wide Web.)

So lately, I've been doing the same thing as you: I'm increasingly using ChatGPT to do this basic fact-finding stuff. In this way, it mostly operates the search engine for me, but it lets me drill down through a sea of terrible search results to find something useful fairly quickly.

It's still not great -- I still have to reject mountains of bullshit. But it's better than alternatives, and I can reject the bullshit with conceptual descriptions instead of trying to get Google to do what I need it to do (what it used to do).

It feels all wrong using an LLM to do this stuff, but whatever. I'm still getting stuff done.

That’s a great way to summarize. Same