Web search has gotten worse. Maybe it's always been like this and I only just started to notice. In any case, web searches today are poisoned with ads, AI-generated content and SEO. Somewhere within those results you may find your answer or a link to the code you want.

Until they figure out how to do SEO for an AI, or OpenAI opens bidding for embedding ads into its model, replacing my search engine (Startpage) with ChatGPT has yielded a much more pleasant experience using the Internet that has provided straightforward answers to questions far more succinctly than the rambling articles about recipes, gardening or whatnot that are engineered for the highest CTR on the exact words you typed in.

Adding ChatGPT to the url bar is done by by adding a custom search engine and setting it as the default. That way, when you type something in and hit enter you are greeted with ChatGPT helpfully responding directly to your query.

Paired with my Smart Searching across many different sites offering search, I am able to find the resource I need or the answer to my question almost every time without pulling out the tired @g shortcut for a Google search.

Follow the instructions in the above linked article to add a new search engine, specifically for Firefox. If you use Chrome then the instructions are similar but the menu names are different.

This is the query string you're going to add:

https://chat.openai.com/chat?q=%s&temporary-chat=true

Recently temporary-chat=true has caused some issues, namely that I get a response and then it immediately disappears. It's a bug on their end that's forced me to remove it, though I wish it worked because my one-off queries now clutter my history. Better than not using it all though.