While ChatGPT is a language model trained on mountains of information from the internet, the free version doesn’t actually have access to the internet. There are third-party tools you can integrate with ChatGPT to give a similar functionality, or you can upgrade to ChatGPT Plus and activate web browsing through the settings menu, but if neither of those options appeal to you, there is a nifty trick you can try.
Say you’re trying to choose a product to buy out of a range of competitors offering similar things. If you don’t want to read through every single product page yourself and compare them manually, you can try pasting them into ChatGPT and asking for a product comparison. What makes this easy is that you don’t need to be selective with the text you paste into ChatGPT. Simply press Ctrl + A to select an entire webpage, then Ctrl + C to copy it. Paste it into the ChatGPT interface, and the LLM should figure out what’s relevant and what’s not. It’s still good to be clear and concise with your prompts, as discussed earlier, but as soon as you say, “Here’s the webpage,” you can paste the entire thing in just like the image above.
This trick can be used in a number of ways, such as generating TL;DRs or searching for specific information. If you do use it for searching, however, make sure to instruct it to include the original text where it found the answer, so you can fact-check its responses.
