On the other hand, I am really happy with https://phind.com and find myself using it if I struggle to understand some concept.

For me, the power of the chat based apps is that I can explain my mental model and they can directly build upon that.

I still use Google, but sometimes I use ChatGPT where I may have used Google.

But having said that we are still early. If ChatGPT gets access to current information and can quote sources, pull out pertinent parts of web pages, etc then I might stop using Google.

That would be like a restaurant that lets you eat then leave with your weekly shop but at costco prices.

Google: "<local restuarant>" = Full page of information including reviews, links to order delivery, directions, etc. All in a standard UI that doesn't change from restaurant to restaurant. Muscle memory takes over.

ChatGPT: "Tell me about <local restaurant>" = Blurb of text that may or may not be useful.

People, including myself, have asked Google a lot of straight-up questions over the years, and those use cases match well with generative AI. But the overall point of a search engine is to find something on the internet, and I don't think that's going to go away.

The question is to what extent this "something" is answers to questions or content that is only useful in its original format.