In July this year, OpenAI released beta version of its own search engine SearchGPT. Now the company has announced that the Internet search feature is becoming part of the ChatGPT AI bot. Paid ChatGPT subscribers will be able to evaluate the innovation this week, and it will become available to free users, enterprise customers and educational institutions in the coming weeks.
OpenAI does not intend to release SearchGPT as a separate product. Instead, the developers integrate the search engine with their chatbot ChatGPT. The algorithm independently determines when to activate the search on the network based on user requests, but if necessary, this function can be started manually. The integration of web search into ChatGPT will bridge a key competitive gap with OpenAI market rivals such as Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, which have long offered customers access to online web search. Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, fell about 1% following the news.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT search provides access to the latest sports scores, stock quotes, weather data and other information through online web searches. During a demo of SearchGPT's capabilities, an OpenAI representative showed how you can easily monitor Apple's stock price online while accessing related news. All information provided to the user is accompanied by links to primary sources. In addition to this, there is a sidebar with sources and brief descriptions of the articles.
The new search feature will be available on all ChatGPT presence platforms, including Android and iOS, as well as macOS and Windows. According to the developers, the search function was developed based on a “combination of search technologies”, including the Microsoft Bing search engine. Initially, SearchGPT was made available to 10 thousand test users, and now the company is making the search engine available to all ChatGPT users.