OpenAI is Taking on Google with a New Artificial Intelligence Search Engine

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – OpenAI has announced its most direct competition yet with Big Tech giants: a new search engine leveraging advanced artificial intelligence. Dubbed SearchGPT, this innovative tool aims to revolutionize online search by integrating AI from the outset.

The company unveiled SearchGPT on Thursday, revealing that it combines AI technology with real-time web information. This allows users to search for information as naturally as they interact with ChatGPT. Currently, the search engine is in an early testing phase for a limited number of users, but OpenAI plans to eventually incorporate it into ChatGPT.

SearchGPT presents a significant challenge to Google, which has long dominated the online search market but has been racing to catch up in the AI arena since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. It also poses a threat to Microsoft’s Bing, which integrated OpenAI’s technology last year to better compete with Google.

Users of SearchGPT can ask questions in natural language and receive direct, up-to-date answers along with online links to clear and relevant sources. This contrasts with ChatGPT, which often relies on older data. For instance, a demo clip showed SearchGPT answering a query about the “best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota” with detailed information about tomato varietals and links to relevant sites like “The Garden Magazine” and “The Gardening Dad.”

Additionally, SearchGPT provides a sidebar with more links to pertinent information, similar to Google’s traditional search results layout.

“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” OpenAI explained in a blog post. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”

This new search engine could solidify generative AI — technology capable of producing original text and other media — as the future of online information retrieval. Google and other companies have begun incorporating chatbots and AI-generated answers into their search platforms. However, AI tools have sometimes been prone to confidently presenting false information without signaling potential inaccuracies.

OpenAI’s initiative follows Google’s rollout of AI-generated summaries in May, designed to streamline search results. However, the feature was quickly retracted after producing false and nonsensical responses. Concerns were also raised by news publishers worried that AI summaries might reduce web traffic by eliminating the need for users to visit their sites.

In response to these concerns, OpenAI stated that it partnered with publishers to develop SearchGPT and offer them options to manage their appearance in the search results. The company also clarified that sites can appear in SearchGPT even if they’ve opted out of using their content to train the AI models.