On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a search engine that has artificial intelligence built right in, posing the biggest danger to its long-standing Big Tech competitors.
The company is piloting SearchGPT, which will let users search for information in the same way they converse with ChatGPT by fusing its AI technology with real-time web data. OpenAI stated that it intends to eventually incorporate the technologies into ChatGPT, even though the search engine is presently in an early test for a small group of users.
Google, which has long dominated the internet search industry but has struggled to keep up with OpenAI’s race since its November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, will now face contending against the new feature. Microsoft’s Bing, the runner-up search engine that integrated OpenAI’s technology last year to better compete with Google, may also be threatened by SearchGPT.
Similar to how they converse with ChatGPT, users of SearchGPT will be able to ask questions in natural language and receive responses that they may subsequently expand upon with more inquiries. However, SearchGPT will offer current information along with web links to what the business claims are “clear and relevant sources,” in contrast to ChatGPT, which frequently uses older data to generate its replies.
For instance, in a demonstration video that the firm released, SearchGPT provides links to websites like “The Gardening Dad” and “The Garden Magazine” in addition to tomato variety information in response to a question regarding the “best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota.”
In addition, the tool will display a sidebar with more links to pertinent content, which is a lot like the ten blue links that consumers are accustomed to seeing on Google search results pages.
In a blog post, the company wrote that “finding answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results.” “We think that by adding real-time web data to our models’ conversational capabilities, it will be possible to find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily.”
After Google and other search engines experimented with early attempts to integrate chatbots and AI-generated answers into the search experience, the OpenAI search engine may solidify generative AI—technology that can create original text as well as other types of media—as the future of finding answers online. However, given AI tools’ tendency to declare false information with confidence and without any signal that it might be inaccurate or misleading, that future is not certain.
To save consumers from having to click through numerous links to quickly get the answers to their inquiries, Google introduced new AI-generated summaries at the top of some search results pages in May. This is where OpenAI’s new tool comes in. After giving some users’ requests inaccurate and sometimes completely incomprehensible answers, Google promptly stopped using the feature.
Some news publishers expressed reservations about the Google tool’s launch as well, fearing that the AI summaries could harm their online traffic by eliminating the need for people to visit their websites to obtain information. These worries might also apply to OpenAI’s search engine.
On Thursday, OpenAI, however, announced that it has collaborated with publishers to develop the tool and provide them with the ability to “manage how they appear” in SearchGPT’s results. It further stated that websites may still show up in SearchGPT even if they have chosen not to allow the company to utilize their content to train its AI models.
Olagoke Ajibola is a creative writer and content producer with an eye for details and excellence. He has a demonstrated history of telling stories for TV, Film and Online. Aside from being fascinated by the power of imagination, his other interest are travel, sport, reading and meeting people.
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