ChatGPT's answer to Google Search is now available

Key Takeaways

• OpenAI released ChatGPT Search, using multiple search engines for results, potentially providing better information.
• The SearchGPT prototype's success led to improvements based on user feedback.
• SearchGPT will soon expand to other OpenAI projects like canvas.

It’s 2024, and the industry’s biggest artificial intelligence companies are starting to battle it out in a previously unfounded battleground: internet searches. While Google is the world’s biggest search engine, it didn’t have the biggest head start in the AI world like some of its biggest competitors when it unveiled Gemini, itself a mutation of the former Google Bard, last year. Google’s biggest AI rival, OpenAI, is the developer behind ChatGPT, an AI service that’s probably the most well known of the lot. ChatGPT’s latest offering directly takes on Google’s AI-powered Search.

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Today, OpenAI officially released ChatGPT Search. According to its official release, users can now get “fast, timely answers with links to relevant web searches,” something that sounds distinctly similar to Google’s AI Search feature. However, ChatGPT Search utilizes multiple third-party search engines to provide results and sources, while Google only uses its own (obviously). This has the potential to provide better information to ChatGPT’s end users. Android Police can confirm that multiple staff members have access to the new tool, which is based off of GPT-4.

The prototype was a success

Source: OpenAI

Back in July, OpenAI announced SearchGPT officially, but it was only available as a prototype build for select users that signed up to access it. In today’s release from OpenAI, it says that feedback provided by users that participated in the prototype was used to improve the experience before it went public. Additionally, OpenAI plans to continue improving SearchGPT’s abilities when it comes to shopping and travel search queries. SearchGPT will come into OpenAI’s other AI projects, like Advanced Voice and canvas, and both free and logged-out users will be able to access it in the future.

We’ve done a lot of testing over the last year to find out which AI tool is better between ChatGPT and Gemini. Back in February, we said that ChatGPT offered a better experience and was smarter when responding naturally to prompts than Gemini, but in this fast-moving industry, things change rapidly. We also said we wanted to see Google integrate Gemini with more of its products across the Workspace; that has happened. For OpenAI, ChatGPT finally allows users to search through their chat history with the AI bot on its web client, bringing it up to par with the mobile app. The more competition, the better in this ever-changing landscape.