OpenAI Announces SearchGPT, Potential Competitor For Google

OpenAI recently announced SearchGPT, its brand-new search engine that is expected to be able to compete with Google in the near future.

The much-anticipated product announcement represents a significant achievement for the company, as SearchGPT is believed to have the potential to elevate the capabilities existing search engines to great new heights.

However, as it stands, SearchGPT currently exists only as a prototype. OpenAI refers to it as a “temporary prototype” that is still set to undergo big changes in future.

At the moment, it’s undergoing basic testing, and the programme is limited to 10,000 users.

Even though our current knowledge of SearchGPT  and its capabilities is limited, months of speculation about its supposed imminent release has led to the consolidation of a decent idea of what SearchGPT is going to be.

So, we’re going to talk about what Search GPT is and how it’s going to work, along with how it’s expected to compete with Google and what OpenAI’s plans are for the programme in the future.

 

What is SearchGPT?

 

In the most basic sense, SearchGPT is a search engine created by OpenAI – at least, the idea is that in the near future, that’s what it’s going to be.

The programme, however, is intended to be far more advanced than a basic search engine, with the ability to cite sources, making it easy for users to to visit these sources and even connect with publishers.

Essentially, the objective is to provide a service that effectively and efficiently combines the capabilities of AI services like ChatGPT and ordinary search engines.

That is, an answer to a question or search that consolidates all available information to provide users with an answer, like ChatGPT does, along with the relevant sources, like Google does.

 

How Does SearchGPT Work?

 

Users will type an enquiry into the search bar that asks, “What are you looking for?”. SearchGPT will respond with an organised answer to your request, along with direct links to the sources of its information.

For instance, if one were to make an enquiry about different recipes that include chicken as the main ingredient, SearchGPT will be able to provide a response that not only includes a series of sources that provide relevant information about such recipes, but it will make sense of it too.

What does that mean? Well, Google, for instance, is limited to the above. All it does (at the moment) is organise information that it deems relevant to your query and provide it to you in list format, prioritising the most accurate information.

SearchGPT, however, takes it one (big) step further. Not only will it find all the relevant information and organise it for you in terms of relevance, it will also explain its findings.

That means that alongside your list of sources that provides your with exciting ideas for chicken recipes, you’ll find an explanation of the information in each source as well as why it may be what you’re looking for.

Since SearchGPT is still very much in its infancy stages, operating as a prototype with very limited users, it’s difficult to tell exactly how effective it is and how efficient it’ll be.

However, that said, it poses an exciting, innovative take on the use of AI in search engines, and, undoubtedly, has a great deal of potential to be incredibly useful if it’s ass effective as it promises to be.

 

 

How Will SearchGPT Compete with Google?

 

Naturally, what people are wondering is: how will SearchGPT compete with Google? And, that is, of course, an excellent question.

In fact, this concern has been around for a while. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched back in 2022, investors already expressed concern that Google would lose market share to the emerging AI-driven company. And now, two years later, it seems like that threat has only become more pressing.

SearchGPT is now moving directly into Google’s market, threatening to outdo it with advanced AI technology with potentially superior capabilities.

This prototype provides users with a brand-new way to efficiently find information online, one that OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, asserts is significantly “more natural” and conversational.

Google, however, is working behind the scenes to remain competitive in this ever-changing market.

In fact, they released AI Overview in May that aimed to enhance the search engine’s capabilities by providing users with a summary of answers to search queries at the top of the page. However, the launch ended up being fairly disappointing, with AI Overview producing a lot of accurate and nonsensical results.

As such, it seems like OpenAI may have the upper hand at this point in time, but while SearchGPT is still in such early stages of testing, there’s no telling how Google may be able to improve AI Overview in the meantime.

 

Future Plans for SearchGPT

 

Regardless of whether Google or OpenAI manage to hit the market with their brand-new AI-powered search engines first, the potential for market is exciting.

Over and above its exciting developments within the app, OpenAI has stated that it intends to integrate features of SearchGPT into ChatGPT in the near future too, which will only increase ChatGPT’s capabilities and OpenAI’s overall dominance in the world of AI.

As for the competition between Google and OpenAI, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.