SearchGPT has officially been integrated in ChatGPT, meaning OpenAI’s LLM now has full real-time search engine capabilities.
In its announcement, OpenAI said Search will be available immediately to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks and free users over the coming months.
OpenAI has been testing SearchGPT for several months and there has been much anticipation about when it would go live. The announcement positions OpenAI as a potential rival to Google, especially if it is able to offer a better user experience, for example with better quality results and less cluttered results pages.
ChatGPT will either search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking on the web search icon and typing in your query.
You can search in conversational style with the chatbot and get timely answers with links to relevant sources.
“Ask a question in a more natural, conversational way, and ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web. Go deeper with follow-up questions, and ChatGPT will consider the full context of your chat to get a better answer for you.”
Up-to-date information is provided with links to sources such as news articles and blog posts.
OpenAI says it aims to bring content owners opportunities to reach a broader audience.
“By integrating search with a chat interface, users can engage with information in a new way, while content owners gain new opportunities to reach a broader audience. We hope to help users discover publishers and websites, while bringing more choice to search.”
Clicking on the Sources button below the response opens a sidebar called Citations with links to sources.
OpenAI has partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories such as weather, stocks, sports, news and maps.
There's a Chrome extension you can download to make ChatGPT your default search engine on Chrome.
Feedback from the SearchGPT prototype informed the integration of SearchGPT into ChatGPT. Future planned improvements in search include areas like shopping and travel.
ChatGPT Search is powered by Bing's search index, and more. This was confirmed by OpenAI's VP of Engineering in response to a question on X.
Source: X
A challenge to Google?
OpenAI’s launch announcement has garnered much interest. Back in July when the SearchGPT prototype was launched, Sam Altman wrote: “We think there is room to make search much better than it is today“.
People have started testing the feature to guage the quality of results both in terms of accuracy and relevancy, and also as a comparison with Google where it has been widely felt that the quality of search results as well as the user experience has deteriorated.
@nichepursuits on X expresses what a lot of people are thinking about Google results right now.
"...Machine learning has created a google algorithm that not even the Google engineers fully understand or can control (as revealed by several people that attended the Google Web Creators meetup this week).
The results?
People almost universally agree that Google results are worse now than ever. Small publishers are getting crushed. AI is stealing content from bloggers...and not sending them any traffic.
If Google keeps chasing the "cool" AI trends and lets machines "do its thing", it's not far fetched to imagine a world where Google is only a shell of its former self.
And ChatGPT just officially launched its AI search engine. So, not only is AI potentially killing Google from the inside, but now AI Search Engines are directly competing against the Big Googrilla."
A proper assessment of how ChatGPT search performs will take time, but the competition in search has been notched up a couple of degrees.
