OpenAI unveils SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine that promises to transform how we access and understand information online
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced its entry into the search engine market with SearchGPT. The AI-powered search engine has the ability to access information from the internet, retrieving it from websites, databases and recent news articles.
The San Francisco-based company’s announcement directly challenges Google’s long-standing dominance in the search market and suggests a potential shift in how users find information online.
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Like its counterparts, SearchGPT greets users with a familiar prompt: “What are you looking for?” But that’s where the similarities end. Instead of churning out a page full of links, SearchGPT organises and presents answers with up-to-date information from the web, providing concise summaries and attribution links to relevant resources.
The example shown on Open AI’s blog post included a simulated query of a user asking about music festivals happening in their location. SearchGPT replied with a list of upcoming events and links to their websites. The post also showed how users can ask follow-up questions and SearchGPT would understand the context of the previous answer to deliver a relevant response.
OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO Sam Altman shared the experience on the social media platform X saying, “I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I prefer this to old-school search and how quickly I adapted.”
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. The company’s announcement of SearchGPT will challenge Google's hold on the search market (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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OpenAI said it is collaborating with various news organisations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and Vox Media to ensure proper content management and attribution to the original source article. Publishers can also choose to opt out of having their content used for training OpenAI’s models while still appearing in search results.
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SearchGPT is currently in its prototype stage and powered by the latest GPT-4 models. It will initially be available to only 10,000 test users. Other interested users can sign up to be on a waitlist to test the new search tool.
OpenAI plans to eventually fold SearchGPT’s capabilities directly into ChatGPT rather than maintain it as a standalone product.
SearchGPT’s arrival has shaken the search market and sent the share prices of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, down 3 percent following the news.
While SearchGPT's effectiveness remains to be seen, its debut highlights the intensifying competition in the space. With Google already incorporating AI capabilities into its search platform and startups such as Perplexity vying for a slice of the pie, the race for AI-powered search supremacy is well and truly on.