OpenAI challenges Google with new AI-powered search engine

New York, CNN — On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled its latest challenge to major tech giants: a new search engine featuring integrated artificial intelligence from the start. 

The company introduced SearchGPT, an AI-driven search engine designed to deliver real-time web information, allowing users to interact with it as naturally as they would with ChatGPT. Although currently in an early testing phase for select users, OpenAI plans to integrate this functionality into ChatGPT in the future.

SearchGPT will directly compete with Google, which has long led the online search market but has struggled to keep up with the AI advancements spearheaded by OpenAI since ChatGPT's debut in November 2022. This new tool also poses a potential challenge to Microsoft’s Bing, which incorporated OpenAI’s technology last year to better compete with Google.

Users of SearchGPT will be able to ask questions in everyday language and receive up-to-date answers with links to relevant sources. For instance, a demo showed SearchGPT providing information on the best tomato varieties for Minnesota, complete with links to “The Garden Magazine” and “The Gardening Dad.”

The tool will also feature a sidebar with additional related links, similar to the traditional search results users see on Google. OpenAI hopes that by combining conversational AI capabilities with real-time web data, SearchGPT will make finding information faster and more efficient.

The OpenAI search engine has the potential to establish generative AI—technology capable of producing original text and various types of media—as the future of online search. This comes as Google and other companies have experimented with integrating chatbots and AI-generated answers into search results. However, this future is uncertain, given AI tools' tendency to confidently present false or misleading information without clear indications of inaccuracies.

OpenAI's announcement follows Google's May rollout of AI-generated summaries atop search results pages, intended to provide quick answers without clicking multiple links. Google had to retract the feature after it produced inaccurate and sometimes nonsensical information.

The introduction of Google's tool also sparked concerns among news publishers about potential loss of web traffic, as users might find answers without visiting their sites. Similar issues could arise with OpenAI’s search engine.

In response, OpenAI stated that it has worked with publishers to develop SearchGPT and offers them options to control how their content is displayed in search results. Publishers can also appear in SearchGPT even if they choose not to have their content used for training OpenAI's AI models.