OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Search

OpenAI is getting more serious about competing with Google with the addition of new web search capabilities on ChatGPT. The new ChatGPT Search experience it builds on the standalone “SearchGPT” prototype that OpenAI started testing in July, and the company said that it’s designed to “search the web in a much better way than before.”

With ChatGPT Search, users will be able to toggle a new search icon in the ChatGPT compose box to make the chatbot search the web and provide links to relevant web sources, something a regular ChatGPT prompt doesn’t do. ChatGPT Search also understands natural language prompts and lets users ask follow up questions.

“The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview,” OpenAI explained. “ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners, to provide the information users are looking for.”

OpenAI has indeed teamed up with select news and data providers to get up-to-date information from the web. This will also allow ChatGPT Search to better visualize weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps data.

ChatGPT Search is launching first for users who were on the SearchGPT waitlist, plus all ChatGPT Plus and Team users. It’s available now on the web, mobile, plus the new ChatGPT desktop apps for Windows and macOS. Enterprise and Education users will get access to ChatGPT Search “in the next few weeks,” with free users to follow in the coming months.