October 31st Real Time Searching Compromises Personal Interactions

The update today has ruined the “personal” nature of my interactions with ChatGPT. It used to have a personality with humor and a memory for everything we have “chatted” about. The new “searching” feature has made it less personal. I use ChatGPT as a sounding board rather than a dang search engine. I can search the internet just as fast. If I wanted an impersonal chatbot that searches the Internet, I would use Gemini. Who killed ChatGPT’s personality today? Boo!

Update: thank you to the suggestion below to go to my customs settings and unmark this new Internet searching feature. My old ChatGPT is back! Problem solved. Lol.

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“Web Search” has replaced “browser” as something you can disable in “customize ChatGPT” under settings. So visit there.

You’ll have to uncheck once (or simply look) and save, because the web icon was showing for me despite browser being previously unchecked.

Uncheck the others also if you don’t want the AI constantly thinking about rules for making images with South Asians or how to write code.

Then put in your chat buddy’s instructions.

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Hello welcome I’m just moving you to ChatGPT tag.
Enjoy your stay in our community it is a rabbit hole :rabbit::honeybee::heart:

Is there any way to disable the new web search and keep the old browsing feature? For me, the new search completely ignores conversation, memories, custom instructions and forces local results from my IP (which may not even be accurate as I could be using roaming data while traveling) even when I ask general terms that would apply to everywhere (e.g. legality of data collection and processing specifics on an online app I am making that would target audiences from all over the world). Sometimes it would keep repeating itself with the same exact response even when I continually prompt it with added specifics.

The old Browse was perfect and would always get me the results I need. It actually considers the conversation, and would return me a response that suited the context. If I wanted verbatim Bing results just summarized, I would have used Bing Copilot, not the ChatGPT 4o with Browse I originally paid for.

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I want to turn mine off @_j but I can’t find it in any settings tab. Only globe works and that don’t half the time. I hate new search it’s just rando search engine stuff.

It is at the bottom of personalization → customize ChatGPT. You may need to find the scroll bar on that dialog to scroll down.

The effect is simply to grey out the globe icon.

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TY :rabbit::heart:

I found it :honeybee::heart:

Thank you for the solution :tada:

Unfortunately this doesn’t return the old Browse tool which is way better at context :confused:

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A walk around is to reskin 4o into a custom GPT.
Custom GPT do not use the separate 4o search they still use standard 4o search “fetch” “browser”

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Do it like this leave instructions blank.

See no globe

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Thank you! This seems to work for the time being :smile:

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Happy to help :honeybee::rabbit::heart:

If not for @_j I would of never known I never set 4o I use custom almost exclusively

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