Google isn’t the only search engine tackling AI head on. Bing has artificial intelligence, and now ChatGPT does, too.
For the better part of nearly 30 years, finding information on the internet has come down largely to one name: Google. There are other players out there, sure, but Google is the biggest, and so it’s the one many of us turn to.
In the past few months, Google appears to be getting worse, somewhere between algorithm updates that affect websites when the engine doesn’t think the content is helpful, and also thanks in part to AI overviews that can produce incorrect results often to the point of ridiculousness.
That’s hardly a great experience for users, but it is opening up opportunities for rivals to pop up.
While at least one has already been put to bed in that time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT looks to be getting its own take on search very shortly.
Unsurprisingly, it’ll be called “SearchGPT”, and it will essentially be a ChatGPT-based version of search, allowing you to ask a ChatGPT box questions and have current and relevant answers formed as an answer for you.
That’s distinct from the way ChatGPT works now, which is to use a library of information gathered from a certain time. Your results on ChatGPT at the current time might lack the most up-to-date information, which certainly can matter depending on what your search is.
OpenAI notes that searches made using SearchGPT will cite publishers with attribution and links, helping you to know where the information is coming from, with follow-up questions able to be asked Mitch like a conversation with an individual. In short, your results will be less a list of search results and more an answer that you can work from, similar to what Google is trying in Gemini.
Trying this feature, however, might be far off for most people, with SearchGPT going live initially for a small number of users as it’s tested. Anyone keen to get their hands on it before the official launch will need to sign up for the SearchGPT waitlist, with the final version expected in the coming months.
