> We no longer have Google, effectively

Veering offtopic a bit... Google lost its (search) way years ago. See the "The Man who Killed Google Search" [1], and the room they left for alternatives like DuckDuckGo.

At work, we have full access to Claude, and I find that I now use that instead of doing a search. Sure it's not 100% reliable, but neither is search anyhow, and at least I save time from sifting through a dozen crappy content farms.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

When you use a search engine, you can evalute the "trustness" of the source (webpage), this essentially disappears when using a chatbot

Only if you're dumb about it. Asking for source links is one thing I do all the time, and chatgpt gives citations by default.

What's the benefit of using a chatbot if you still have to go and read all of it's sources on your own?

The same, I suppose, as using Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic, a surface understanding, before following the citations to dig deeper and fully validate the summary.

You can get precise citations supporting the facts of interest to you, so that you don't have to dig through the sources on your own.

At least for the time being the chatbot isn't optimised to deliver as many ads or sponsored results to your eyeballs as physically possible.

> I used to be able to copy pasta code with incredible speed - now all of that is gone.

What do you mean by that?

Meaning I would get an answer from SO pretty quickly and it would most often work.

What is SO?

SO is the website Stack Overflow.