OpenAI takes its assault on Google to the next level by rolling out ChatGPT Search
The company also launched a web-browser extension that would allow users to set ChatGPT search as their default search engine.
ChatGPT now has a full-fledged search engine. Today OpenAI announced ChatGPT Search, a new feature built into the company’s ChatGPT AI tool, which opens a new front in the company’s competition with Google.
The feature is available to paid “plus” and “team” subscribers now, and will be rolled out to enterprise and educational customers in the coming weeks, followed by free users months later.
Shares of Google fell 1.8% after the news on Thursday as the broader market also declined.
Users don’t have to specify that they want to perform a web search when asking a question, as the tool will perform web searches when it needs to, but users can choose to select a button that will just give them web results for their queries.
“By integrating search with a chat interface, users can engage with information in a new way, while content owners gain new opportunities to reach a broader audience. We hope to help users discover publishers and websites, while bringing more choice to search,” OpenAI wrote in a press release.
The responses to search queries contain citations, appearing as small gray buttons with the name of the source of the information. Tapping on the buttons takes you to the source article. Users can also pop open a citations sidebar, first listing the cited sources, then a list of relevant search results below it.
OpenAI has signed content deals with over a dozen large publishers such as News Corp, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, and Reuters, and this new feature appears to show the fruit of those deals. The company says other publishers can choose to appear in search results by allowing OpenAI’s “OAI-SearchBot” to scrape their sites.
Search results with citations was one of the distinguishing features of startup Perplexity.AI, but the company was recently sued by News Corp’s Dow Jones and New York Post unit for copyright violations. OpenAI’s licensing deals appear designed to avoid this type of legal exposure.
OpenAI also released a web-browser extension to allow users to set ChatGPT Search as the default search engine.
