OpenAI
That’s intentional, according to the company’s announcement. OpenAI said in its blog post that “getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort,” and often requires multiple tries to “get relevant results.”
“We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier,” the company said in the announcement.
You can also follow up with SearchGPT results with clarifying questions, or click on a button on the lefthand side to see a longer list of websites related to the query.
In an example of a search for “music festivals in boone north carolina in august,” a follow-up question around if one of the events is family friendly yields a clear answer.
OpenAI
OpenAI has Google in its crosshairs
With SearchGPT, OpenAI is clearly positioning itself against Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and AI startup Perplexity’s search feature.
Google’s SGE also gives users an AI-generated summary of search results, but the feature hasn’t yet been rolled out to the public, and it’s still being tested. Alphabet shares were down 2% within an hour of the announcement.
The search feature will be able to search the web in real-time and automatically summarize results from Microsoft’s Bing. Microsoft has a partnership with OpenAI and has invested billions of dollars in the company.
SearchGPT will also allow users to connect with publishers by citing and linking “clear, in-line, named attribution and links,” the announcement said. The feature will help users figure out where information is coming from and will allow them to engage with more results in a side bar with links.
There’s big money to be had in search, and Google is the undisputed leader. The lion’s share of Google’s revenue comes from its search business — $175 billion in revenue came from Google search and related ads last year, up from $162.45 billion in 2022, its annual report shows.
It also has about a 90% share of the search market, the Department of Justice said recently in the closing arguments of its antitrust case against Google.
By comparison, Microsoft’s Bing has a 5.5% share of the search market, the DOJ said. But Microsoft seems serious about its AI search ambitions.
Microsoft introduced its AI-powered Bing last February. At the time, CEO Satya Nadella said, “AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all — search.”
OpenAI’s announcement comes after The Information in February that the company had been quietly developing its own web search product.
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.