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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

The previously sensible advice to never use ChatGPT for search needs to be rethought - GPT-5 in thinking mode is shockingly good at running searches now simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/r...

simonwillison.netGPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search“Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back …
Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I've been less impressed by Perplexity - I've found it tends towards more verbose answers with less obvious citations (it's less clear which facts came from which sources) plus I've not yet got a good feeling for how well it evaluates source credibility compared to GPT-5

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Archived fry69
@fry69.altq.net

I have to concur. For a while (~>1-2 months ago) Perplexity was superior, but either it degraded in it answers or ChatGPT with search has become much better. Maybe a bit of both. Either way: While I used Perplexity nearly exclusively for a while, I now only use it occasionally to check on it.