OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI Chatbot ChatGPT, has made a significant move into the search engine market, by adding a new search function to its model.
By integrating a new search function, ChatGPT is now capable of accessing and processing real-time web data to provide more comprehensive and up-to-date answers to user queries, challenging Google’s dominance in the search engine market.
Announcing the launch of the feature, the company wrote,
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“Introducing ChatGPT search. ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before so you get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more. ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon.”
How the Search Feature works
The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by its partners, to provide the information users are looking for.
Commenting on the functionality of the search feature, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the feature has in recent times doubled his usage.
He wrote on X,
“Search is my favorite feature we have launched in ChatGPT since the original launch. It has probably doubled my usage over the past few weeks.”
To enhance the quality and relevance of search results, OpenAl has formed partnerships with major media organizations, including Condé Nast, Time Magazine, and the Financial Times. By incorporating content from these reputable sources, ChatGPT aims to provide users with accurate and reliable information. Also, the company has partnered with data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.
All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, already have access to the search feature. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. The company has announced plans to roll out to all Free users over the coming months.
As OpenAI continues to expand the capabilities of ChatGPT, with the recent integration of a search feature, it will undoubtedly reshape the competitive landscape of the search engine industry.