On Thursday, October 31, OpenAI launched ChatGPT search, as a way to strategically position the company to compete with search engine giants like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity.
For tech enthusiasts, this news is not so surprising as OpenAI had in July, announced it was beta-testing a prototype of the search engine, called SearchGPT, and now it has officially rolled the product into ChatGPT.
ChatGPT search offers users up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and so much more, all of which is powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company.
With this release, Alphabet investors have grown increasingly worried that Google’s dominance as the top search engine could be toppled by OpenAI giving consumers new ways to seek information online.
Following the launch of SearchGPT,Shares of Alphabet were down about 1%.
The move has also positioned OpenAI as more of a competitor to Microsoft and its businesses. Even though the latter has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI, OpenAI’s products still directly compete with Microsoft’s AI and search tools: Copilot and Bing.
Meanwhile, OpenAI had revealed, that users can “search in a more natural, intuitive way” and ask follow-up questions “just like you would in a conversation.”
The company also added that ChatGPT will “automatically search the web based on what you ask,” according to an OpenAI blog post. This means that users can manually click the web search icon within wanted to search if they choose.
All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as members of SearchGPT’s waitlist immediately had access to ChatGPT search as from Thursday, however, ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu users will be able to use the feature in the next few weeks, while the product will roll out to users of ChatGPT’s free version “over the coming months,” OpenAI announced.
