This week I switched it up and allowed the ChatGPT plugin to take over search on Google Chrome. That feature came out forever and a day ago, but I had a use case for it now and thought I would give it a go. This worked fine for some things, but for trying to get to a website or lookup something maps related I ended up installing DuckDuckGo. My main goal in this pursuit was to just stop Googling things as much. Most of the time I don’t really need to utilize Google services. 

Right now I’m writing on my MacBook Air and it would be possible to just mostly switch to Apple technology. Between using an iPad and a MacBook Air I could functionally just switch over. Part of that would be trying to use an internet browser that just cannot be tracked and is pro security and privacy. One alternative to even taking that path is just allowing ChatGPT to handle all my required searches. My guess would be that Sam Altman and the OpenAI team generally do not  really care about indexing my searches and knowledge graphing my interests and are more worried about being first in the pool to actualize some type of AGI. 

Using this new framework throughout the week my overall searching for things has radically diminished. That is probably for the best. I’m not entirely sure easy access to relatively useless information is all that productive anyway. Focusing on higher quality information gathering and research is an important pivot. That is for the most part the right direction to head. Generally people are going to keep moving away from the open internet into other types of interfaces. It’s entirely possible that people will just task an agent with doing all the web searching for them and never really have to traverse the internet. That path forward is going to be interesting. A lot of the online content is getting worse and worse anyway as the slop farms crank out more and more content optimized for SEO that has been put through an intellectual blender.