ChatGPT’s Google search rival is set to go live this year – could SearchGPT break Google’s hold on the web?

ChatGPT’s Google search rival, SearchGPT, is set to launch by the end of this year, ushering in a new generation of OpenAI’s chatbot.

As reported by Press Gazette, OpenAI’s head of media Varun Shetty told a conference in Brussels that the company intended to launch SearchGPT as part of ChatGPT by “the end of the year.”

SearchGPT is OpenAI’s AI-powered search engine that will allow users to quickly get answers to queries without clicking through to another website. You’ll simply be able to ask things like “Did the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins last night? And if so who scored?” and get a full run-down of the results.

However, SearchGPT is currently in testing, and reports of the AI search engine’s performance have been less than stellar so far. In September, The Washington Post published an article with hands-on impressions of the search engine, and there was a sense that Google’s AI rival still had lots of work to do.

Now, Shetty’s confirmation that we’ll get to try SearchGPT before 2024 comes to a close suggests that OpenAI has managed to bring its product up to par with other AI search engines like Perplexity and Arc Search.

War of the search engines

The launch of OpenAI’s search engine could be a turning point in both the development of AI and the battle for search engine supremacy. For decades, Google has been unrivaled, but if any AI product can challenge its dominance it’s likely to be one developed by AI’s trailblazer OpenAI.

Compared to a traditional search engine, SearchGPT answers queries with natural language as well as indicating the source of its answers so users can quickly access full articles. Shetty said, “This is the core experience that we’re building, and this is where you can see the balance that we’re trying to get right between users and publishers.”

As it stands, if you ask ChatGPT for an answer it will give you it without sourcing its information. The arrival of SearchGPT should go some way to satisfying AI-skeptics who want to read and consume original content rather than get a brief AI-generated summary.

I’ve been using AI on my iPhone 16 Pro Max as a way to quickly search the web with Arc Search, and while it’s been fantastic so far, OpenAI’s entrance into the space could be an absolute game changer. Time will tell if SearchGPT can genuinely challenge Google to become the average internet user’s go-to search engine.

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