OpenAI Announces a Rival to Google: SearchGPT

OpenAI just announced that SearchGPT has been released as a ‘temporary prototype’. In a blog post released by OpenAI, users can sign up for a waitlist to be one of the early users of the prototype. 

What Is SearchGPT?

SearchGPT is a search engine developed by OpenAI that is designed to provide more accurate and relevant search results by combining natural language processing and web search. 

This search engine aims to challenge the dominance of Google’s search engine by offering a more sophisticated approach to information retrieval. As a new player in the market, SearchGPT’s success will depend on its ability to provide a superior search experience.

Key Features and Capabilities

At the heart of OpenAI’s new search engine lies a sophisticated set of features and capabilities designed to change how users interact with search results.

SearchGPT’s key feature includes a more conversational search style. OpenAI had this to say about how SearchGPT functions.

“SearchGPT will quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources. You’ll be able to ask follow-up questions, like you would in a conversation with a person, with the shared context building with each query.”

To highlight this they gave an example of a search query “Best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota”. An overview is shown in the search results with a list of relevant results. 

A follow-up search is then performed: “Which of these can I plant now?” SearchGPT remembers the context of the previous conversation and shows results relevant to the current month. The engine’s proprietary ranking algorithm aims to rank search results based on relevance and accuracy, providing users with the most useful and reliable information.

The engine is also designed to learn from user feedback, allowing it to refine and improve its performance over time. By utilising a combination of web scraping and indexing, SearchGPT can provide users with up-to-date and thorough search results.

Availability and Access Restrictions

Currently, SearchGPT will only be available to a limited group of users who sign up for their waitlist. This restricted access is likely intended to allow OpenAI to fine-tune the engine and gather feedback from a controlled group of users. These access restrictions will likely continue until OpenAI is confident in the engine’s performance and reliability.

While the prototype is temporary, OpenAI plans to incorporate the best features of SearchGPT into ChatGPT in the future. 

Impact on the Search Engine Market

Google has long been the market leader in search engines. However, there are some signs that this is starting to waiver. The increased use of TikTok as a search engine by younger generations and the development of ChatGPT both contributed. 

To combat this Google started to roll out AI Overviews as part of its Search Generative Experience. These were met with criticism from users about their inaccurate results. In response, Google reduced the number of AI Overviews for YMYL search results. 

This came on top of concern from publishers that LLMs are scraping the data from their websites and using it without credit. In their blog post, OpenAI makes a point of describing how they’re working with publishers. 

“SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches. Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links.”

They also make it possible for publishers to opt out of training AI’s generative foundation models and still be part of search results. You can read more about OpenAIs bots here. 

What impact this will have on the search engine market remains to be seen. But, what is certain is that OpenAi is trying to get publishers onside while capturing a slice of the lucrative search engine market.