I have noticed that the quality of results on Google and DDG and others have been declining steadily over the last few years, and I think this is mostly a result of click farms generally getting better at gaming the system. Genuinely quality content is just being drowned out by crap.
ChatGPT doesn’t really address this. I also don’t see ChatGPT as a genuine replacement yet because 1) hallucination is still too big of a problem and 2) the value add of using natural language for queries doesn’t seem all that beneficial to me. Sorta like, how IF you are already used to a terminal, it will be faster or just as fast as a GUI for many things.
The only real value I have seen from ChatGPT, is for complex boilerplate generation that is very easy to verify. ChatGPT is fantastic for generating regex, for example. Or poems, if you prefer.