Is The New Web Browsing in ChatGPT Any Good?

chat GPT just got internet access to GPT 4 users is rolling out this very week again because in May 2023 they released browsing with Bing to everybody but after a month it just disappeared but now end of September 23 they re-enabled it and everybody with cat GPT plus has access already so today we'll look at what is new because something changed and then we'll go ahead and compare some of the use cases we found back in May to the new version and at the end of this video you should be fully informed what's changed and how you can use this to your very own Advantage so to kick things off here's a quick overview you need a cat gbt Plus account to access this for now but the way you enable this is settings beta features and then here browsing with Bing and then you'll be able to go into this drop down and use it as so this is just the way it was before but under the hood it changed a little bit because if you look at the announcement from open AI here they Market this as this massive event where cat GPT has now access to the internet but the truth is we've had that before through Bing but also through plugins if you've been following the channel you'll know that you can enable this plugin called Web pilot and it essentially does the same thing as browsing but it's not that reliable so today we won't be comparing web pilot or Bard to the new Bing browsing that's a topic for another video but we'll Simply Be comparing Bing now to Bing back in May so what changed on the surface is this little browsing indicator Works a little differently now it shows you each step that it's taking as a preview and also they updated the way chat GPT interacts with this robots. txt file if you're not familiar that is a part of every single website and it essentially governs how Bots are allowed to interact with the given website so nobody knows exactly why they took it down but the public reasoning was that their crawler went behind paid walls and into parts of the website that weren't supposed to be accessed and that's why they had to take it down so that changed now and website owners are going to be able to effectively control how cat GPT interacts with their site if you're a website owner you can go to this page and see how that would be implemented but today we'll be talking about what this means for you as a chat GPT user let's get into it okay so for the first step we'll be looking at cat GPT creating an advertising campaign for us with the power of Bing browsing so back in May right on launch I showed you this very simple prompt that uses a link inside of it in order to gather context from the website that we shares okay so we're going to go step by step and test the same thing and compare the results so here's the original prompt we go to browse with Bing and paste it so as you can see it's a very simple prompt asking for advertising campaign for my prompt engineering course targeting AI enthusiasts and then here we have a link so all we do is press play as before and I'm curious to see how the results changed okay so for the first try it didn't even use Bing let's do it again so on the first attempt it doesn't even use browsing so as you can see back then it went to it right away I didn't even have to try multiple times but it seems like I have to make my prompt more specific so let's do that I'll just say review the course URL for more info save and submit and now it does it okay so that's minor but essentially I needed to be a lot more specific to get this to browse the internet and it's done and what changed here is we don't get to expand this anymore we don't see the step by step that it followed it just says finish browsing and then it gives you the information hm but it couldn't access the details so let's run this again okay there you go fail number three it did it but this is not advertising campaign and now it finally worked so certain things didn't change you need multiple attempts to make this work properly but there you go this is the first draft I could regenerate this multiple times seems to work but what about the results are they different are they better but honestly from already what I'm seeing I don't love this it's not taking the in-depth approach as before and it doesn't give me detailed information from the landing page that I wanted that's the main point here so let's give this two three more attempts before we move on and write this capability of because this is not what I'm looking for yeah seems like all of these results are very generic compared to the more tailored results that we got back here in May that actually considered what's on the website so let's move on to the next one let's see if this theme reoccurs but I want to try one more thing before we move on and that is enabling custom instructions cuz I have my own custom set here and now it should be more tailored towards my very own needs so let's have a look there you go that's way better so you need to be more specific than back in the day but this is due to the changes in gp4 not browsing so I like this answer way better already because it gives me more strategies it goes more in depth but again it didn't really use browsing here right so if I regenerate is it going to keep ignoring it and yeah it seems like it keeps ignoring it so either I'm doing something super wrong here or it just doesn't work so I would say the first use case here big fail let's see how it performs with our next test which is going to be a research task I would chat GPT to look at YouTube content creators and craft a message to reach out to them so here we are this is the same prompt as back in May and what I'm asking for is two tasks first of all find every AI YouTuber with over 50,000 subscribers secondly use a conversational tone to write an Outreach email proposing a potential collaboration and I'll disable custom instructions here and the first try just says it will start two hours later but it never does okay we have a bit of patience let's try again oh shall I proceed yes please proceed so it seems like they're using more of a model that is linked to the code interpret Advanced Data analysis that is more action oriented where it takes these step-by-step approaches and talks to you as opposed to gp4 that just gives you the best thing right away and no it can't search YouTube no not available so it's just browsing for a list of AI YouTubers and then it does a rough estimate but this is not based upon real world data so let's try again but this is not looking great it's not able to access what we want it to but as you can see every time we rerun it ends up in another destination so if you don't specify anything it's just going to make its best guess another error and okay here it pulled from this website I guess this is okay decent this kind of works it shows the article it referenced it's not perfect and it's not taking the data from YouTube as I wish it did but hey here it asks if it should continue I'll just say Yes again and then we have to say Yes again so this is clearly a different model than raw gp4 and it finally does what we wanted but it doesn't do it step by step this just not a very efficient way of working but at least it's got us something but luckily I have another use case prepared here which should actually get us useful results as this relies more on cat gpd's ability to talk to you than it does on external data although it uses that too so let's do it and this prompt comes from this video align your dream job with these cat GPT tricks where I use cat GPT to prepare for an interview basically I set it up to be an interview coach that practices with me and here's the prompt so you simulate a high level interview for digital marketing analyst position and then you give it a bit of context job description and this one I had to update for my original test because the job description is not available anymore so we're going to go for this data analyst roll on glass door and we're also going to include the Microsoft website as context so I wanted to be aware of Microsoft's mission and vision before it interviews me so I wanted to be aware of the company's Mission and values before it starts interviewing me cuz that's kind of essential and we have no resume so I'll delete this and let's have a look how this works with browsing well it doesn't use browsing again I have to regenerate multiple times okay but we won't give up here what if I did the same thing with web pilot which is a plugin that essentially replaces Bing because it can search the internet well there you go it fires right away this is what we wanted to see right and just so this is complete we're also going to test the same prompt on Bing chat here so as you can see it decided not to search the internet although we clearly included multiple URL so this is not the way either for anybody in the comments trying to suggest that hey why are you not just using Bing it's just not that good yet that's why I avoid it and yeah same thing if you rerun it so this just doesn't want to access the internet let's have a look at web pilot over here and look this is what was looking for read the Microsoft website get the data and then based on that form your questions same thing for the job description it got all the content and the details so let's just test it with a simple prompt what job is this about and what is the salary if it didn't look inside of the website it can't know what the salary is so 121k would be the correct answer and it just completely fails it talks about a different job a different salary let's give it one more chance but this is not looking good yeah so now it's better but it didn't get the details that we wanted not great or terrible so it seems like if we use web pilot it works better than Bing right now cuz it actually uses the web search but let's be real here not all of the features that are coming out are the next killer use case and this is one of those examples this might explain why in their announcement they just said that the new thing is the fact that the websites will be able to restrict the usage and it feels like a lot of websites did just that so basically we got the same feature that we had back in May with our new GPT model under the hood that is more action oriented that's good I like that but it doesn't seem to engage the browsing if I need it and that is kind of a big deal and if it uses the browsing I have no control over it doesn't even show me what steps it took and generally this is just not a reliable tool right now so here's my recommendation if you want to use browsing feel free to experiment with this but I'd still rather stick to web pilot which has been my go-to replacement over the past 3 months and it still seems to work well but don't expect miracles from this either it's going to be able to go to the website and gather some data but not all the data so from this future that we're so excited about where AI has access to all of the internet and is like fully up to date it's not the case yet maybe in a few months but as of now expect nothing but a surface level search that this will do for you and Bing H still not where we want it to be and here's my recommendation to run this out if you actually want data from the websites still the best way to go about it is just deleting this link and including this data from the job description here like so and then you can do the same for the company website and then I guess I'll just copy over the values here and then there you go here it works this is the way to make it work so you just copy the content into here instead of using Bing browsing and just hoping for the best this is a controlled way to get results but hey maybe somebody had a different experience or they're able to share how they do it for me right now this doesn't really work I'm going to stick to copy pasting things into chat chpt and if you want productive results so should you I hope this was helpful and I still encourage you to check out the videos that I talked about today cuz they're full of interesting use cases with browsing as of right now just don't expect it to work reliably and be aware of the fact that many sites blocked chat GPT from accessing them so while the underlying language model here might be a better one the browsing function seems to be a weaker version of what we got in Spring nevertheless I'll keep exploring