Combining GPT3 and Web Search — Perplexity.ai and lexi.ai

"ChatGPT is not overly reliable... surprising how often ... right, but they can also be plausible and wrong a lot of the time, and downright obviously wrong some of the time... responding with errors of fact, ... responses that may only be true for certain (biased) contexts... wary of providing evidence or citations ... [but] happy to make up citations...Perplexity.ai ... appears to combine GPT3 responses with Bing queries". It takes the original prompt, turns it into a search query, and the constructs a new prompt for ChatGPT:

"Generate a comprehensive and informative answer (but no more than 80 words) for a given question solely based on the provided web Search Results ... unbiased and journalistic tone... Combine search results together into a coherent answer... Only cite the most relevant results that answer the question accurately... Format: # # Question: ${question text} # # Search result: [${index}]"

Lexii.ai had more trouble.

In conclusion: "Custom search engines were a really powerful thing that never really went anywhere 15 years or so ago."