In July, OpenAI announced a new search engine. It is now available to a wider range of users. This is a new search feature within ChatGPT, the company’s viral chatbot. The new search engine will help the company compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity.

Paying subscribers to ChatGPT can activate a mode that has the AI tool respond to queries by searching the web for the latest information and summarising what it comes across. This is different from coming up with answers based on potentially old data used to create the chatbot. The search functionality is powered by the Bing search engine of OpenAI’s backer Microsoft. It also draws on articles from publishers the AI developer has signed deals with, like Wall Street Journal owner News Corp and the Associated Press.

The new search capabilities is using OpenAI’s 4o model. OpenAI’s enterprise and educational customers will be able to get access to the features in the coming weeks and free users sometime in the coming months. 
The success of ChatGPT in late 2022 forced tech companies to take a closer look into generative AI and introduce features around it. OpenAI-backer Microsoft and Google have overhauled their search products to include more conversational AI features. Rival startup Perplexity is in talks to raise funding at a $9 billion valuation, Bloomberg has reported. Now that ChatGPT Search is here, OpenAI is set to bring similar AI search functionality to the 250 million people who use the chatbot each week.

The changes will make ChatGPT more useful and accurate, Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, said in an interview. “We think it improves relevancy and decreases hallucinations, because of the ability to go out to the web.”

ChatGPT's search results will include links to source sites in line with its written responses, and also in a group of “citations” along the right side of the screen

The tool has the potential to change the way we look at search. For many years, Google has been the gateway to the web, making news media and other publishers depend on it for traffic. The company is now criticised for placing too many ad-powered search results at the top of its list and one has to go through a number of links to come up with the correct search results. Though Google has changed some of its old stance but it’s far from a completely new experience.

The AI search tools from OpenAI can summarise webpages and answer questions directly to help users find information without clicking through to another website. (Google is also doing something similar.) This has set the alarm bells ringing for publishers who fear they will be put out of business by tech companies.

Queries that trigger such searches are often followed by links to the website the content was summarised from. Shetty told The Washington Post that ChatGPT’s algorithms might understand the content of articles from OpenAI partners better because they get a direct feed from those publishers, but that news organisations that have signed deals do not get preference in results. Nor are those companies lowering their paywalls to people who land on their site from an OpenAI link.

The new release may have implications for Google as Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google.

At the same time, the latest development may make OpenAI a rival of Microsoft, which has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI. In a Reddit AMA on Thursday, OpenAI’s engineering VP, Srinivas Narayanan, answered a user question about whether ChatGPT search used Bing as the search engine behind the scenes, writing: “We use a set of services and Bing is an important one.” The company’s CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on X that search is his “favourite feature we have launched” in ChatGPT.

OpenAI wrote in a blog post that it used feedback from its SearchGPT prototype to build out the feature and that it plans to “keep improving search, particularly in areas like shopping and travel, and leverage the reasoning capabilities of the OpenAI o1 series to do deeper research”.

Mathures Paul

How does search work with ChatGPT?

Some ChatGPT queries will now be answered with help from search results sourced from the web.

Search results are displayed only when ChatGPT’s algorithms determine they’re relevant, or when the user taps a globe icon in the prompt box.

Webpages are drawn from Microsoft Bing and other sources, besides fresh news from participating publishers.

There are no product shopping links and ads for the time time being.

Paid ChatGPT Plus and Team users will have access to the feature at first.