OpenAI is testing a new offering called SearchGPT that uses generative AI to explain search results for users, potentially putting it on a collision course with Google in the search engine business.
Google completely dominates the global search business like few corporations have in history. The Alphabet subsidiary owns more than 80% of a market worth about $200 billion this year and projected to grow to nearly $400 billion by 2031, according to statistics from Skyquest and Statista. In distant second place is Microsoft and its Bing search engine, with about a 10% share.
Lots of vendors have tried to dislodge Google from its perch high atop the search ladder, to no avail. Such is the power of having a verb named after your company (“Why don’t you Google it?”), not to mention having many of this generation’s top computer scientists, data scientists, and AI developers on the company payroll.
Now OpenAI is taking its shot at the mighty Google with SearchGPT, which brings its large language model (LLM) technology to the consumer search business. Unveiled last Thursday (July 25), SearchGPT is currently in a prototype stage and available to just a small group of users.
Size of global search business (Source: Business Research Insights)
According to OpenAI, SearchGPT will deliver “quick and direct” answers to questions using “up-to-date information from the web” along with “clear links to relevant sources.” As the users are presented results, they’ll be able to follow up with additional questions, giving SearchGPT a conversational feel.
“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” OpenAI writes in a blog post. “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.”
OpenAI says it’s working with “a small group of…publishers” with the SearchGPT prototype, including Reuters, The Atlantic, and News Corp., publisher of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. “We are committed to a thriving ecosystem of publishers and creators,” the company says in the blog post.”
By “prominently citing and linking to [publishers] in links,” SearchGPT will provide a degree of transparency and provenance that has sometimes been missing in early GenAI products. But OpenAI also points out that even if publishers aren’t working directly with OpenAI, their news will still be cited. “Sites can be surfaced in search results even if they opt out of generative AI training,” OpenAI writes in the blog.
SearchGPT is not widely available at this point, but interested users can sign up for the SearchGPT wait list here. But it will widely available soon, as OpenAI intends to roll SearchGPT features directly into ChatGPT in the future.
(Ebru-Omer/Shutterstock)
OpenAI says it’s not using the same foundational models in SearchGPT that it’s using for ChatGPT and other GenAI offerings. This is all about search, the company says.
AI has been employed in search engines for years. Google, for instance, has been employing some form of AI to enhance its search engine results since at least 2001 (and many search advocates will tell you that search itself is a form of AI).
But AI-powered search has been supercharged for the past few years, as neural nets and vector similarity search technologies and techniques have become more widely available. The same underlying language models and vector databases that can be used to create GenAI applications can also be used to bolster search results on the Web or company websites.
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