OpenAI Launches Its Search Feature To Compete With Google

Currently, Google leads the global search engine market, being the preferred choice of around 90% of users.

OpenAI is trying to break that, as it recently announced the launch of its ChatGPT search engine through a news release published on its website.

In all fairness, this move didn’t come as a surprise, seeing how OpenAI had a limited launch of its SearchGPT product in late July 2024.

Yet, the new product comes with a lot of promise.

What Is OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search About?

“Get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources,” is how OpenAI describes the new search engine in the news release’s opening line.

The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o and builds on feedback received from the SearchGPT prototype.

Essentially, ChatGPT’s new search engine allows users to “search the web in a much better way than before” and get quick answers and will direct users to relevant web sources, such as news articles and blog posts.

What’s different now is the chatbot can search the web for a user’s query, blending its conversational benefits with up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes and more.

Currently, the service is available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users to try, along with waitlisted users (the waitlist is currently closed). The service also comes with a downloadable (Google) Chrome extension. Additionally, it will be available through chatgpt.com and OpenAI’s desktop and mobile apps. 

It’s no wonder that the artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) industry leader OpenAI was going hard on tying up with numerous publishing houses over the last year. This included partnerships with Reddit, BuzzFeed, Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time and Vox Media.

“We also partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps,” is what OpenAI said about the numerous partnerships.

What Did Publishers Say About ChatGPT Search?

Pam Wasserstein, the President of Vox Media, said, “ChatGPT search promises to better highlight and attribute information from trustworthy news sources, benefiting audiences while expanding the reach of publishers like ourselves who produce premium journalism.”

Mathias Sanchez, SVP of Global Strategic Partnerships at Axel Springer SE, said, “As AI reshapes the media landscape, Axel Springer’s partnership with OpenAI opens up tremendous opportunities for innovative advancements. Together, we're driving new business models that ensure journalism remains both trustworthy and profitable.”

Louis Dreyfus, CEO & Publisher of Le Monde, said, “We are convinced that AI search will be, in a near future and for the next generations, a primary way to access information, and partnering with OpenAI positions Le Monde at the forefront of this shift. It allows us to test innovations at an early stage while safeguarding journalism’s core values and integrity.”

Ahead of this, the company also announced SimpleQA, a factuality benchmark that measures the ability of language models to answer short, fact-seeking questions. This announcement came one day before its search feature was revealed.

Do you think OpenAI’s ChatGPT search will be able to pull away users from other search tools, including Google, Perplexity and Bing, the search engine owned by OpenAI’s biggest backer, Microsoft, as well as others?

Let us know in the comments below!