If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.

If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.

Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.

If you have a list of specific criteria, search engines are impossibly bad at finding what you’re looking for, but top LLMs do it with ease.

ChatGPT and Claude have been amazing timesavers in my recent tech acquisitions at work, and I find I am able to find better solutions

Chatgpt found me a lot more choices.

I wanted custom lifts for a shoe. Chatgpt found me a local store that did it, I'd been calling around for years asking to no avail.

Chatgpt is really damn good at niche stuff.