SearchGPT is OpenAI's Direct Assault on Google and Perplexity
It also takes aim at Microsoft's Copilot
ChatGPT was an extraordinary tool from day one. It could eruditely summarize information, transform it into another style, facilitate brainstorming, and generate content. It could even answer questions to a degree. However, the answers were sourced from the foundational model’s training data, which was not up-to-date and didn’t provide an easy way to verify the response’s veracity. That was somewhat rectified with the Bing and Browsing plugins and then somewhat improved after the native Bing integration in 2023. Still, it has always been somewhat dissatisfying.
That dissatisfaction was cemented when compared with Perplexity’s generative AI-enabled search that typically leveraged OpenAI’s large language models (LLM). Google’s Bard was also better than ChatGPT search, though it was too often wrong. Gemini has significantly improved that experience and its accuracy. Even Google’s generative AI-enabled add-on to traditional search was superior.
This is critically important because search has always been one of the most obvious and beneficial use cases. Regardless of how far ahead OpenAI may have been with LLM performance, ChatGPT was inferior at search. OpenAI has set out to rectify that deficiency with SearchGPT.
SearchGPT Prototype
OpenAI announced a waitlist for the SearchGPT prototype this week and offered a few sneak peeks at what the new search experience may look like.
We’re testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new search features designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources. We’re launching to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback. While this prototype is temporary, we plan to integrate the best of these features directly into ChatGPT in the future.
Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.
This sentiment is exactly right. Traditional search is significantly inferior to generative AI-enabled search. The ability to have a conversation with your search results is a significant benefit in extending your research or clarifying your results. It eliminates the need to start over when traditional search just isn’t sending you the right backlinks.
In addition, traditional search assumes that users will become their own information archeologists. Google or Bing may point you to a potential source of an answer to your query, but not the answer. It also may ignore some important nuances that could significantly improve the results. Generative AI-enabled search gives you an answer. No more information archeology is required. If you want to consult the sources, they are provided. That is useful for verifying the results. However, as these searches have improved, errors have become less and less frequent You get an answer instead of a link to find an answer on your own.
These results save users time and often provide additional context that they might have missed. When you summarize the best information from three to ten search results, you typically receive a more well-rounded result. To do that on your own is very time-consuming as you could easily be required to read 1,000 to 10,000 words before figuring out doing your own summary.
New Search User Experience
Anyone who has used Perplexity or Google’s Search AI Overviews will recognize some familiar output formats. However, there appear to be some new user experience layouts that may offer slight improvements to existing styles.
One new layout promises to offer more data on the screen. Notably, there are not ads anywhere. However, that doesn’t mean ads won’t show up at some point. Perplexity has indicated that it will consider ads, while Microsoft and Google have already experimented with ad placement for some searches.
Another change for OpenAI is that new search capabilities will be far more visually oriented than we have seen from ChatGPT to date. Images and videos will be some search results formats, and it looks like the search will likely include carousel options.
Granted, we don’t know what the final user experience will be like at this point. However, it appears that OpenAI is going for a mix of the styling offered today by Perplexity and Google.
The New Search Wars are Upon Us
SearchGPT is just a prototype feature for now, but it is an indication that OpenAI is now taking search seriously. That means the search wars are about to heat up. Google still has more assets to leverage in these battles. However, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others indicate the start of the long journey toward eroding Google’s once unassailable dominance.
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Gen AI search that provides answers so users don't have to click on links may work fine for vendor or government sites. But what about journalism sites? What is the incentive for media sites to keep posting new information online if humans will never visit? What is the business model that makes sense for people to keep producing and publishing news on the Web?
What will be interesting regarding ads is that this search will not be structure like traditional search so placing ads will be challenging. Instead of influencing buyers from a known starting point (where they place their ad) they will need to align to consumer (searcher) intent. That is anathema to modern marketing "professionals"