More and more, I find myself turning to ChatGPT instead of Google. Especially when I don’t even know what I’m searching for.
The other day, I wanted to see a kind of Graph View of all my blog posts on WordPress. Something like what Obsidian shows, where each note is a dot, connected to others based on internal links. A constellation of thought and its interconnectedness. I often use it in Obsidian to find related or isolated notes. I wanted to do the same for my blog.
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So I typed “Graph View WordPress” into Google. What came up were plugins to display bar graphs and pie charts. Not what I meant. Not even close. Sh!
I didn’t know what to search next. All I had was the idea in my mind.
So I opened ChatGPT and asked, “Are you familiar with Graph View in the app Obsidian? What is the technical term for it?” It turns out it’s called a force-directed graph.
I then asked if it knew any plugins that could do that in WordPress. At first, it gave some rubbish. So I asked it to search online. And it found a plugin specifically for WordPress called Post Connect.
I installed it. And there it was. Exactly what I’d been trying to describe but hadn’t known how to name.
Why ChatGPT Worked Better Than Google
It’s not that Google didn’t have the answer. It’s that I didn’t have the right words to search with. And even if I did, the plugin wasn’t described in the way I would have phrased it. Why would it be? Most people aren’t asking for an “Obsidian-style Graph View plugin for WordPress.” That search probably only makes sense to someone like me.
That’s where ChatGPT worked better than Google. Not because it got everything right the first time. Not when you know the answer. Not even when you know the question. But when you don’t even have the words for what you’re looking for. When you need help finding your way through the fog of your own mind.
Google is brilliant when you know what to look for. But when you’re still trying to find the words to describe what you are looking for, when you’re moving through intuition and not keywords or search terms, that is when, for me so far at least, ChatGPT works better than Google. And that is why, more and more, I find myself turning to ChatGPT instead of Google.
If this felt familiar, you might enjoy another reflection: How I Work with AI to Write a Blog.
