#ChatGPT : 1. Google on steroids

If you ask the right Q, you'll get the right A - but how?

How to teach ChatGPT to come up with Google formulas

Original artwork digitally made by Henk van Ess with MidJourney

ChatGPT is a powerful language model capable of speeding up your work. If you don’t know it yet, catch up . You can use it in a browser. Or install it as an app for Windows and Mac. If you do know ChatGPT already and dismissed it as an hallucinating professor, I agree, but still, read on.

Let’s dive deep into a matter. You are search professional and everyone looks at you for the answer. Find any official document about carbon dioxide reduction from Greek companies, anything from March 24, 2020 to December 21, 2020 will do. Hey, can you search that in Greek, please?

Tough question right? Time to fire up Bing or ChatGPT.

Round 1 in #chatgpt has a terrible outcome. I typed in the question almost exactly as I did in the last paragraph.

Find any official document about carbon dioxide reduction from Greek companies, anything from March 24, 2020 to December 21, 2020 in Greek.

It gave me a ball of yarn. Let’s untangle it.

The answer is wrong for four reasons.

site:gr/en, is a way of saying: 'Hey, we think this page might have something to do with Greece and maybe, just maybe, it's in English.' It's like a wild goose chase, but instead of geese, you're chasing ghosts. It doesn’t catch all English pages, and besides that, it misses the Greek ones.

An official document is like a ninja - it doesn't need to announce itself to be official. It sneaks up on you and before you know it, you're trapped in its bureaucratic grip.

Greek company is not a phrase that is often as used as Greek yogurt. Especially local companies feel that their nationality is obvious to their customers.

And searching for “March 24, 2020”..”December 21, 2020” is a nonsense query.

Flash forward. After you are done with this newsletter, you will understand why #chatgpt is suddenly a brilliant workhorse. Once instructed by me, soon by you, ChatGPT came up with this.

("CO2 reduction" OR "carbon dioxide reduction" OR "reduction of CO2") site:gr after:2020-03-23 before:2020-12-31 (filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc OR filetype:docx OR filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx OR filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx)

This will search for documents in Greek domains that contain any of the variations of the keyword "CO2 reduction" within the specified date range and are in PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file formats.

It searches Greek websites, uses local word variations, only in most common filetypes, and exactly in the specific time frame. The results were helpful.

The question that's worth millions of dollars: what did I type into ChatGPT to get this ridiculously long question, but with tremendously helpful answers? Just this:

GGA Greece CO2 reduction 3/24/20-12/21/20

And then, a day later, I needed to know any official stuff about electric cars in Japan, from the early days, in 2015. I just typed in:

GL Japan electric cars 2015

I got:

site:*.jp (electric car OR 電気自動車 OR EV OR エレクトリックカー OR zero emission car OR ゼロエミッションカー OR hybrid car OR ハイブリッドカー OR plug-in hybrid OR プラグインハイブリッド) after:2015-01-01 before:2015-12-31 filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc OR filetype:docx OR filetype:xls OR filetype:xlsx OR filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx

This query is designed to search for official documents related to electric cars in Japan between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2015, in various formats including PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The query also includes variations of the keywords "electric car" in Japanese, such as "電気自動車" and "EV", to ensure a comprehensive search.

Powerful stuf, huh?

This newsletter is about the journey to rephrase your real question into the rigid logic of #chatgpt. Let’s start.

Unleashing the power

To fully harness ChatGPT's potential, it's important to know how to properly instruct it in order to produce accurate and relevant results. Simply throwing random queries at search engines like Google is not enough to unlock the true power of natural language processing. While it may be tempting to rely on Google to quickly find information, even Google cannot produce useful or relevant results without a clear and specific search query.

So we have to think before we do? Yes. By taking a thoughtful and deliberate approach to search queries, you can unlock the full potential of natural language processing and get the results you need. The good news is: you only have to do it once for each of your favorite queries. Set and forget, as you just saw I used the same formulae for Greek CO2 and Japanese EV’s.

The advantage of natural language processing tools like ChatGPT is that they can help you generate more accurate and relevant search queries in a faster and more efficient way than manually typing in long and complex queries into search engines like Google. By using natural language processing tools to refine and optimize your search queries, you can avoid falling into "rabbit holes" of irrelevant or inaccurate results and get the information you need more quickly and easily.

We'll start by looking at how to properly instruct ChatGPT to produce accurate and relevant search results, and then move on to more advanced use cases and techniques.

The disappointing start

The idea is to instruct #chatgpt to make universal queries that apply to all kinds of Google searches. This is how I started:

The thing is, there was no proper introduction. I didn’t have a conversation. I just demanded stuff. Ask first:

Now it’s set to stay in the Google hemisphere. You do have to know some Google tricks first to let ChatGPT play along.

The problems I want to solve:

Specific periods

Date search in Google can be done with after:2020-03-23 before:2020-12-31 where after is March 23, 2020 and before is Dec 31, 2020

Variations

I need some synonyms

Official stuff

For this search, I want to find official stuff. Filetypes can be searched with filetype:(extension). So PDF search is filetype:pdf. And Powerpoint is pptx or ppt for older versions.

Search for local websites

In stead of searching for the words "Greek company", it should go to Greek websites in general. You can do that with site:gr

Here are the instructions I came up with for making your own script.