OpenAI’s New Search Engine: Everything We Know So Far

By Naila Syifa
Updated May 2024

OpenAI ChatGPT Search Engine

OpenAI is reportedly developing a new web search product. The rumor has been circulating since February, but a recent report from Bloomberg revealed more details about the company's plans.

The new feature would enable ChatGPT to crawl the web to provide more accurate and up-to-date information to users' queries. Results are expected to feature AI-generated summaries, citations to the original sources, and even images in some cases.

This new advancement could potentially revolutionize search, allowing users to get quick, concise answers to their questions without having to sift through pages of search results. However, this idea is not new.

Perplexity, founded in 2022, has already developed a similar AI-powered search engine that combines language models and web crawling to provide concise, informative responses.

Google, which has been dominating the search engine market for decades, has also been experimenting with Search Generative Experience (SGE), integrating generative AI into its traditional search results, as well as developing its own Bard (now Gemini) AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT, but with the ability to search and cite information from the web.

The war for dominance in the AI-powered search market is heating up. Competition from new players like OpenAI and Perplexity may shake up the traditional search engine landscape. The launch of a ChatGPT-backed search engine could also position OpenAI in a more direct competition with Google, after the company's chatbot became a viral sensation that threatened Google's dominance in the information industry.

Some have also been speculating that the rumored ChatGPT search engine may be the ambition of none other than Microsoft, whose search engine Bing has long been second to Google and with its relentless efforts to challenge Google's dominance.

Microsoft has been backing OpenAI with more than $13 billion in investment since 2019. The new ChatGPT search engine is also reported to be powered partly by Microsoft Bing, leveraging Bing's search engine technology as well as Microsoft's long years of expertise in web search and indexing. Microsoft's Copilot could become a potential model for how the new ChatGPT-powered search engine might look and function.

OpenAI has not officially confirmed the development of a new search engine, but the company has registered the domain name "search.chatgpt.com" along with a security certificate, suggesting that the launch of the new search product may be a matter of when, not if.

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