I think adding an option to enable or disable the web search feature in ChatGPT would improve the user experience. The problem isn’t that web search exists—it’s useful. The issue is how it changes the way the model responds.
Before web search was introduced, ChatGPT could still pull in knowledge from the web, but the responses felt natural. Now, the way it delivers results feels more like a search engine than the conversational assistant it’s supposed to be.
What’s needed is simple: let users decide whether web search is active or not. When it’s on, responses should still feel as natural and conversational as they did before. The focus should be on how the information is delivered, not just where it comes from.
This change would make the feature more useful for everyone without taking away the core experience.
I totally agree. It’s probably worth dropping chat gpt and going back to google and using paying for Gemini. This is a bad sign where OpenAI is losing touch already and it’s not going to last.
Its really poor Company direction because the internet already has a good free search engine called google. It’s very fast and if you know the expressions to search deep in google it works better than chat gpts weak searching it does now. Google also has Gemini now which gets better search results and can do reasoning similar to the old chat gpt.
AMENDMENT:
I tried a few other models and chat gpt is still very useful. Can somebody please clarify this search option. It might just be how we are using the model.
Hello - I am not sure it is fully related. However I have the feeling that the Web search button has been disabled? Is it so. Its just not working for me since the last one week. Earlier i thought it was temporary, not after reading this post i get the impression its been disabled…mixed thoughts here and confused. Can you help?