GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is good at search

Summary

GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search 6th September 2025 “Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feels even better. I’ve started calling it my Research Goblin. I can assign a task to it, no matter how trivial or complex, and it will do an often unreasonable amount of work to search the internet and figure out an answer. This is excellent for satisfying curiosity, and occasionally useful for more important endeavors as well. I always run my searches by selecting the “GPT-5 Thinking” model from the model picker—in my experience this leads to far more comprehensive (albeit much slower) results. Here are some examples from just the last couple of days. Every single one of them was run on my phone, usually while I was doing something else. Most of them were dictated using the iPhone voice keyboard, which I find faster than typing. Plus, it’s fun to talk to my Research Goblin. Bouncy travelators They used to be rubber bouncy travelators at Heathrow and they were really fun, have all been replaced by metal ones now and if so, when did that happen? I was traveling through Heathrow airport pondering what had happened to the fun bouncy rubber travelators. Here’s what I got. Research Goblin narrowed it down to some time between 2014-2018 but, more importantly, found me this delightful 2024 article by Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle with a history of the SFO bouncy walkways, now also sadly retired. Identify this building Identify this building in reading This is a photo I snapped out of the window on the train. It thought for 1m4s and correctly identified it as The Blade. Starbucks UK cake pops Starbucks in the UK don’t sell cake pops! Do a deep investigative dive The Starbucks in Exeter railway station didn’t have cake pops, and the lady I asked didn’t know what they were. Her...