Why is ChatGPT stuck ‘thinking’ and giving me skewed answers?

Hey everyone, I'm using ChatGPT as a quick way to gather information, kind of like a fancy search engine. Lately, it keeps getting stuck in this 'reasoning' mode, and there's no way to turn it off. Even when I ask it to stop, it just won't listen. It flashes momentarily and starts searching various websites, even though I've told it not to use the web tool unless absolutely necessary. The result? It gives me really skewed responses; sometimes it completely makes up information or fails to get simple facts right, like the name of a town! It's becoming unusable for me, and I'm tempted to do everything manually instead. If there's a simple fix or anything I can try to make it work properly again, that would be awesome!