OpenAI To Launch 'SearchGPT' in Challenge To Google

OpenAI is launching an online search tool in a direct challenge to Google, opening up a new front in the tech industry's race to commercialise advances in generative artificial intelligence. From a report: The experimental product, known as SearchGPT [non-paywalled], will initially only be available to a small group of users, with the San Francisco-based company opening a 10,000-person waiting list to test the service on Thursday. The product is visually distinct from ChatGPT as it goes beyond generating a single answer by offering a rail of links -- similar to a search engine -- that allows users to click through to external websites.

[...] SearchGPT will "provide up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources," according to OpenAI. The new search tool will be able to access sites even if they have opted out of training OpenAI's generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT.

challenge to google?

[snowshovelboy]

Google, the advertising company? Wow.. can't wait to see sponsored responses. Now that I think about it, all of the verbose "ai safety" addendums to responses are already that. Futures so bright I gotta wear shades.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Google is at least as woke as openai, and at least as censorious. So no change there.

Hold the phone, what is this?

[nightflameauto]

Are they presenting an AI driven search result that actually provides you search results? What? Is that allowed? I thought the AIs were supposed to do all our research for us, and we were just supposed to trust them blindly.

I'm sorry. Someone find me a fainting couch. I'm not sure I can handle this level of worldview shattering.

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[gweihir]

Yep, I think Hell has frozen over.

This product may actually have real merit and with it, sites have a reason to allow AI crawling.

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[echo123]

Is AI crawling applicable here? I would think robots.txt to be more appropriate. We're only talking about a search engine that accepts and understand AI search queries, and spits out links like any other search engine.

I like this a lot, and it is the first serious challenge to Google's dominance that I've ever seen. Often while, coding by prompt', I'll request a citation URL and I can't get one.

Re:Hold the phone, what is this?

[WankerWeasel]

Sounds like this is more about using AI to determine what's accurate, by comparing trusted sources of information, and considering how recent it is, rather than Google's method of using more traditional ranking factors, which don't adjust as quickly when new information comes along. It can take Google months or years to recognize changes to known facts when previous information is too prevalent, and this could be much more real-time. Google can also be gamed and falls for things like link networks (though they've always continued to fight such and gotten better and better at filtering out unauthentic behavior).

The reality is that most of the time people are searching to get the answer for a question. Sometimes that's about finding a specific website, but most queries are for an answer that can be displayed right there in the search results, without the extra step of them looking at search results, going to another website, and then finding the information on the page. It's exactly why Google has been providing their own AI-generated answers on search pages now too. This is more an answer to that.

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[dgatwood]

Sounds like this is more about using AI to determine what's accurate, by comparing trusted sources of information, and considering how recent it is, rather than Google's method of using more traditional ranking factors, which don't adjust as quickly when new information comes along.

I've rarely had trouble finding recent stuff. If anything, the problems I've had most with searching involve content that either no longer exists on the Internet or is buried behind dozens of highly ranked SEO spam sites that contain no actual information.

The problem is that adjusting for "new information" actually makes SEO spam worse, because those companies constantly tweak their content with AI precisely to trick search engines into thinking that it must be higher quality because it is ostensibly more

Re: Hold the phone, what is this?

[LindleyF]

Sounds basically similar to Google's Search Generative Experience.

I'm doing HypeGPT

[Tablizer]

to challenge them all!

Re:

[gweihir]

Amateur! I will do BetterThanHyperGPT to put you in your place!

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[smooth wombat]

BetterThanHyperGPT? Pffft. How lame. You can't beat my PlaidGPT.

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[gweihir]

Arrggghhh! Foiled again!

Google was trying to prepare for this

[Luckyo]

If you remember all the early stuff with Bard at google, and general news of utter panic in the search unit of google in the wake of first mainstream chatgpt release with the desperation to get Bard even marginally comparable...

They knew this was coming, and they were desperately trying to prepare. We'll see if they succeeded.

PageRank suddenly becomes less of a secret sauce.

[PhrostyMcByte]

When you can index based on a conceptual vector, it bypasses a lot of the problems Google's spent its life trying to quantize.

Next Up

[The Cat]

1. The AI is programmed to respond to bribes

2. Brutal, vindictive and sexually violent layoffs

The only actual usecase for AI...

[Kokuyo]

...outside of of pattern recognition in medicine or the like.

I think I might be willing to pay a subscription for this service if it's any good. And I hate subscriptions.

Summer of Peruvian Knot-Code

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, I'm starting card-catalog dot org! Who's with me?

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[Hadlock]

altavista.com has entered the chat

Google already does this

[Guillermito]

When I search using Google an "AI Overview" panel appears at the top with a summary of the search results, including liks to the original sources from which the AI got its data. Most of the time it even produces useful results. Probably it's a feature I was offered to opt-in at some point. I don't even remember when, but it has been there for months. Perhaps what OpenAI will offer is better. We'll see. However, it's hard to see how this move is "opening a new front". It's more like they are playing catch-up.

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[thegarbz]

It's more like they are playing catch-up.

All it takes is to not offer dangerous suggestions likely to kill the readers if followed and they'll have leapfrogged ahead of it.

SearchGPT

[mukundajohnson]

is a mouthful

They can call it 'uselesslies.com'

[Rick Schumann]

Can't wait for the lolcow that'll be some """AI""" search engine that'll probably make up fake results for sites that don't exist.

Perplexity already does this.

[memory_register]

It is literally their business model. Perplexity.ai

Too soon guys

[thegarbz]

The special Olympics aren't until 2025.

That's when the mentally challenged search engines dumber than what we had in the early 00s should come out and battle each other.

Will any of the links actually exist?

[Rendus]

Or will this rely on having so many hallucinations that the broken clock is eventually going to land on a link that's actually real?

No moat?

[daveapriltwenty]

I seem to recall an internal email comment that went something like “We have no moat.”

This Aint about a Search Competitor

[TheWho79]

Some reports suggest that the first site people go to after ChatGPT is Google. eg: they leave ChatGPT and go directly to Google. What we don't know is whether users leave in just in the normal course of surfing, or if they are going to "google" for a response they didn't get from ChatGPT. It think it is suffice to say, some of that is true both ways. We kinda know that now since OpenAI built a search engine, and Google baked AI into the SERPs. Why does it matter? Study after study has shown that "Site on t