I Gave Up ChatGPT Search for a Week. I Missed It Less Than I Expected.

I switched my default search to Bing's copilot for a week as a personal experiment, not a review. The pitch is that it reads the live web and shows its sources inline, which ChatGPT's search mode also does now, but Bing puts the citations one tap away instead of buried under a 'trust me' summary.

What surprised me: I stopped caring which chatbot was smarter. Both drafted fine email replies. The real difference was what happened after the answer. Bing threw me to real pages when I wanted depth; ChatGPT kept trying to resolve the conversation inside the box. For 'should I refinance' type questions, I wanted the primary source, not a confident paraphrase.

The downside is Bing's model is blunter. Ask it to rewrite three paragraphs in a specific voice and it delivers something flat, where ChatGPT would have nailed the tone. So I ended up using Bing to find and ChatGPT to write, which is a dumb workflow for two paid tools.

Verdict: if your main job is 'get me to the right webpage,' Bing's copilot earns its place. If your main job is 'turn my messy thoughts into clean prose,' ChatGPT still wins that fight. I went back to ChatGPT as default but kept Bing pinned for research sprints.