OpenAI Releases SearchGPT to Rival Google and Perplexity

Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are likely shaking in their boots right now with the announcement of SearchGPT by OpenAI. I first heard the news about this new product back in February, along with the roll out of custom GPTs.

The announcement of SearchGPT has already had an impact on Google’s market position. Following the news, Google shares dropped by more than 2%.

What is SearchGPT?

SearchGPT will be powered by the GPT-4 family of models, likely the GPT-4o.

Unlike traditional search engines, which rely heavily on algorithms and indexing, SearchGPT uses advanced AI to deliver real-time search results. This means that instead of just finding and displaying pre-indexed pages, SearchGPT can pull in the latest information from across the internet.

The user interface is incredibly simple. It only has a search field and a submit button—that’s even more minimal than Google’s search homepage.

SearchGPT will only be accessible to 10,000 users at launch, but you can sign up for a waitlist here.

OpenAI is currently collecting feedback from early users and plans to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT.

We’re launching to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback. While this prototype is temporary, we plan to integrate the best of these features directly into ChatGPT in the future.

Key Features of SearchGPT

• Quick Answers: One of the standout features of SearchGPT is its ability to provide quick and timely answers to your questions.

• Real-Time Information: It not only provides the most current data but also clearly links to relevant sources. This ensures that users can verify the information and explore further if needed.

• Search in a More Natural, Intuitive Way: Just like chatting with a friend, you can ask follow-up questions and get responses that feel natural and intuitive.

• Visual Results for Richer Understanding: SearchGPT goes beyond text-based answers by providing visual responses. It supports images, videos, or graphs. The search engine aims to present information in an easy-to-understand format.

How does SearchGPT work?

Unlike traditional search engines like Google or Bing, SearchGPT is designed to understand the intent behind your query, not just match keywords.

It taps into the vast knowledge of OpenAI’s language models, the same technology that makes ChatGPT so eerily conversational, to deliver results that feel more like talking to a well-informed friend than scrolling through a list of links.

The submit button is initially disabled when the search field is empty, then becomes enabled once you enter your search query.

The search results are displayed in a really neat format. No blue links, and no sponsored ads. You get an AI-generated answer front and center.

You can also ask a follow-up question at the end. Similar to how Perplexity AI works.

Can We Trust AI-Generated Search Results?

It can be recalled that Google went under fire when they released the AI Overview feature in Google Search. It gave out weird results, from telling users to put glue on their pizza to suggesting they eat rocks. In response to this issue, the company confirmed it is ‘taking swift action’ to remove some of the AI tool’s bizarre responses.

Similarly, Perplexity has recently come under criticism for an AI summary feature that publishers claimed was directly ripping off their work. These AI-generated articles are ranking higher than human-written ones in Google searches, which infuriates many writers and publishers.

OpenAI took note of this blowback and developed SearchGPT in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, Vox Media, and Time.

“We’ve partnered with publishers to build this experience and continue to seek their feedback. In addition to launching the Search GPT prototype, we are also launching a way for publishers to manage how they appear in Search GPT, so publishers have more choices. Importantly, Search GPT is about search and is separate from training OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Sites can be surfaced in search results even if they opt out of generative AI training.” — OpenAI

Final Thoughts

Looking at the initial demo video, I love how simple and clean the user interface looks. There are no ads or sponsored content, but they have to monetize it at some point. There’s no mention of whether it’s going to be free for all users, have trimmed-down features, or be exclusive to paying ChatGPT users.

What I do know by now is that it’s going to be a useful alternative to both Google and Perplexity. I have been using Perplexity for months now, and I can say that it’s better than Google in some use cases. Now that we have SearchGPT that pulls in information from trusted sources, I can’t wait to see if it can turn into my main search app.

It’s still too early to say whether SearchGPT will have a profound effect on the search market, but seeing OpenAI as a leader in the AI chatbot race, the potential is certainly there.

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