What is ChatGPT Search?
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search in October last year. Similar to searching on Google, users can input keywords and questions on chatgpt.com’s search engine to get relevant web sources and links.
It was earlier available to ChatGPT Plus users, but now can be used by free users as well.
“Getting useful answers on the web can take effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now you can chat to get a better answer. ChatGPT can choose to respond with information from the web,” the company said in a post.
Discover the stories of your interest
How does the search work?
The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, which has recently been challenged by Chinese companies DeepSeek and Alibaba with their own models. ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers, as well as content provided by its partners to give results to users.
How is this different from Google?
Google uses an index-based search, i.e. it crawls and indexes the web and stores information in massive databases. Google’s algorithms analyse the indexed data to rank and retrieve relevant results for users. Google Search also focuses on matching keywords and phrases.
On the other hand, ChatGPT Search is powered by artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI Search focuses on understanding the context, intent, and meaning behind the query. and provides a more conversational experience, allowing for follow-up questions.
Significance
This move expands OpenAI’s search access to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. However, it has drawn criticism from publishers, who argue that AI-powered tools like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews threaten to reduce traffic to the original sources of information.