OpenAI Introduces SearchGPT, an AI-Powered Search Engine

OpenAI announced on Thursday a new ai-powered search engine prototype called SearchGPT. The move marks the company's entry into a competitive search engine market dominated by Google for decades. On its website, OpenAI described SearchGPT is a “temporary prototype of new ai-powered search features that deliver fast, timely answers with clear, relevant sources.” The company plans to test the product with 10,000 initial users and then roll it into ChatGPT after gathering feedback.

SearchGPT’s launch comes amid growing competition in the ai-powered search arena. Google, the world’s dominant search engine, recently began integrating ai capabilities into its platform. Other startups, such as Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity, have also attempted to compete with Google, touting themselves as “answer engines” that use ai to summarize the internet.

The rise of ai-powered search engines has been controversial. Last month, Perplexity faced criticism for summarizing stories from Forbes and With cable Without proper attribution or links to posts, as well as ignoring the robots.txt file, a way for websites to tell data-extracting crawlers to back off. Earlier this week, Wired publisher Condé Nast reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity and accused it of plagiarism.

Perhaps because of these tensions, OpenAI appears to be taking a more collaborative approach with SearchGPT. The company's blog post emphasizes that the prototype was developed in partnership with several news organizations and includes quotes from the CEOs of The Atlantic and News Corp, two of the many publishers with which OpenAI has entered into licensing agreements.

“SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by citing and linking to them prominently in searches,” the company’s blog post says. “Answers have clear, inline, named attribution and links, so users know where the information came from and can quickly interact with even more results in a sidebar with source links.” OpenAI also noted that publishers will have control over how their content is presented in SearchGPT and can choose not to allow their content to be used to train OpenAI’s models while still appearing in search results.

SearchGPT’s interface features a prominent text box that asks users “What are you searching for?” Unlike traditional search engines like Google, which offer a list of links, SearchGPT categorizes results with short descriptions and visual elements.

For example, when searching for information about music festivals, the engine offers brief descriptions of the events along with links to further details. However, some users have pointed out that the search engine already presents inaccurate information in its results.

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In the recent ChatGPT search engine ad, they ask for “music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August.”

There are five results in the example image in the ChatGPT blog post:

1: Festival in Boone… ending July 27th… ChatGPT dates are when the box office is… twitter.com/OBwNgNcLto;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link “>image.twitter.com/OBwNgNcLto

— kif (@kifleswing) twitter.com/kifleswing/status/1816542216678179083?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:July 25, 2024;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link “>July 25, 2024