ChatGPT conversations can build up quickly if you talk to the AI chatbot regularly. However, finding a particular piece of discussion with ChatGPT was difficult, even with well-labeled thread names. OpenAI has released a new search feature for ChatGPT to address this issue. This feature allows you to search past conversations by searching for specific terms, making it much easier to find bits you don’t quite remember, or to pull up old discussions without having to dig deep into the list of discussions.
The search feature is only available to those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus or Teams for now, although free users should be able to use it starting next month. To use the search feature, all you need to do is click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the ChatGPT sidebar. Write the word or phrase you want to find, and the AI chatbot will search your history to locate specific messages. If you have particularly long chat threads, this can save you a lot of time.
We’re starting to roll out the ability to search through your chat history on ChatGPT web. Now you can quickly and easily open a chat for reference, or pick up a chat where you left off. pic.twitter.com/YVAOUpFvzJOctober 29, 2024
ChatGPT search, not SearchGPT
When you hear the term search along with the term ChatGPT, you immediately think of SearchGPT, the rather imperfect web search tool that OpenAI teased this summer. The new tool is more like the way you might search through a folder of documents or perhaps an email inbox.
And while OpenAI hasn’t explicitly mentioned this, it would make sense for search to learn from your interactions the same way it learns from your conversations. That may mean you need to better understand what kind of conversation history you’re likely to look for and you may need to filter the results.
The search feature isn’t exactly earth-shattering, but it at least puts ChatGPT on par with some of its rivals like Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. It fits in with some of ChatGPT’s other quality of life improvements, including a better chat interface, autocomplete suggestions, and the use of “/” to immediately instruct ChatGPT to search online or generate images.