How I replaced all my searches with LLMs

Google
search is
dying

but maybe
there's a
solution

19 Mar 2025

Google search is dying, but maybe there's a solution

Google search is full of sponsored content, ads, listicles, increasingly more stuff is made by garbage AI. What should we do? I stopped hoping for a redemption, or for other real search engines to replace it — I'm stubbornly still tring to use DuckDuckGo, but each alternative has some flaw that make it worse than Google in the end.

I've been using ChatGPT with its search feature for a while now, and I'm convinced LLMs are the best way to search in 2025. No ads, personalized answers, no spam... Some day I'll make my own "deep research like" agent with DuckDuckGo, or Brave Search, or Tavily APIs to perform regular searches.

Here's how I use LLMs for different kinds of searches:

1. Very simple lookups

For like the number of episodes of a tv series. No need for fancy stuff, just basic GPT-4o:

  • Example: "How many episodes in Severance s2?"
  • On desktop: I have a search engine shortcut set up both in Firefox and Alfred; I write the query and it directly opens the tab on ChatGPT. Here's the link: https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s&hints=search. Hint: you can also choose the model: https://chatgpt.com/?model=o3-mini-high&q=%s
  • On mobile: I use the ChatGPT widget to open it directly with search enabled.

2. Opinion-based search (eg. Reddit, X, etc.)

This makes up the bulk of my old Google searches. I used to append "reddit" to every query.

  • System prompt: I made a custom GPTs to make it quicker:
  • Example: "What do people think of M-chip Macbook battery? Use search."
  • Note: explicitly say "use search" in the prompt, or ChatGPT might not trigger it. They probably don't provide the system prompt to the router/orchestrator.)
  • On Desktop: Browser link to the custom GPT.
  • On Mobile: Manually open it in the app.

For these searches, if I'm not yet satisfied, I usually rerun it with the next method, before falling back to a Google.

3. Code + up-to-date knowledge + reasoning

When I need not just facts but some re-elaboration; especially code-related queries — plus fresh info.

  • Model: o3-mini-high (The only other model that currently supports search, other than gpt-4o).
  • Example: "I'm using elasticsearch 8, I want to send data with filebeat. I can find cloud.id, but not cloud.auth in the dashboard. Where is it?"
  • Prompting: Nothing special, the model usually handles it well.

4. Complex search: multi-source + multi-step.

For exploration in which I know I would have to go through many sources, and also for stuff I don't know enough to have a targeted search. This agent makes an extended search with many steps and builds a report.

  • Model/Tool: DeepResearch feature of ChatGPT. There's also the one from Grok 3, and the one of Perplexity (this should currently be the best).
  • Prompting: I usually just write my thoughts plainly into another custom GPTs to improve it. The research takes some minutes and uses a credit, so I want to have a good prompt.


Let's see how fast this becomes outdated.