We’ve been hearing rumors about a ChatGPT search engine for a while, but now it’s finally live. Instead of being a brand new website called ‘SearchGPT’ as many expected, it is simply an upgrade of the existing ChatGPT website and all ChatGPT apps for Windows, Mac and smartphones.
When you talk to ChatGPT, it will now ask you if it should search the web, if it thinks this would get you better results, but you can also manually start a web search at any time. As you’d expect, ChatGPT Search is a feature available immediately to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and all ChatGPT Plus and Team users will get it today. But all SearchGPT waitlist users will also get access today. Enterprise and Edu users of ChatGPT will have access in the coming weeks.
How it works
If you look at your ChatGPT prompt bar, you will see a new search icon called Search. Tap or click this and you’ll search the web with ChatGPT, instead of having a conversation. It’s a bit like the AI summaries that Google already offers in its search engine, but after each piece of text there is an easily recognizable link to sources. When clicked, the sources open a sidebar with quotes.
In case you’re wondering, the SearchGPT waitlist is now closed, so if you haven’t signed up yet, it’s too late now. As for when the rest of the free version of ChatGPT will get this, OpenAI says: “We will roll it out to all free users in the coming months.”
What’s interesting is that ChatGPT partners with several industry sources to offer its own non-Google Maps maps, as well as weather, stock, sports and news information. OpenAI says it is “working with news and data providers to add timely information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news and maps.”
ChatGPT Search already looks attractive and could be the first real threat to Google in years. With ChatGPT Search you essentially get the natural language capabilities of ChatGPT combined with up-to-date information from the web, which could be exactly what people are looking for.