ChatGPT Search Is Live! Time To Bid Goodbye To Google?

The next chapter of search engines is here. And it has nothing to do with Google!

While India was celebrating the festival of lights, OpenAI quietly released ChatGPT Search to the masses. The arrival of ChatGPT Search marks a big step in the evolution of search engines, the concept alone making Google an antique!

Before you start deleting your shortcuts to Google though, hold on. ChatGPT Search isn’t free to access (yet) and there are some caveats. Hence, you should read between the lines to figure out whether the time is right to switch your search engine. 

Hence, instead of beating around the bush, let’s quickly dive into the novelty that is ChatGPT Search and whether this should be the first webpage opening on your web browser.

What is ChatGPT Search?

ChatGPT Search is essentially a search engine just like Google Search. You can look for information from across the world wide web, with the search engine fetching all the sources in the form of hyperlinks and references. However, compared to Google Search, there’s one notable difference. 

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Since OpenAI has integrated the search function into the ChatGPT chatbot, the responses to your queries come out in natural language interfaces. Hence, if you ask ChatGPT Search to help you find the best restaurants in New Delhi, it will present all the information in a rather reader-friendly dialogue format, with source links attached underneath for references. The days of manually figuring out the best web links from a list of websites are gone!

What can ChatGPT Search do?

Based on the SearchGPT experimental project, ChatGPT Search relies on the GPT-4o model to process the data into a natural language interface. The data is obtained via third-party search providers and content partners, all of which provide information from various categories like general news, sports, weather, maps and stocks. 

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If you want to enquire whether an open-air late-night dinner is ideal for a date over the weekend, ChatGPT Search can bring up the local weather details and recommend suitable places based on the forecast. For those who want to get some insights into the stock market, ChatGPT Search is there. The same goes for finding local sushi restaurants in your office area, finding the nearest service station for your car and everything that you can imagine!

With every response, ChatGPT Search will attach the reference link for transparency. And since it's ChatGPT, it is smart enough to understand which of your queries need a web search and which ones can be handled by the chatbot (you can force it to do a web search though).

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How to access ChatGPT Search?

As with most new launches from OpenAI, ChatGPT Search is available to ChatGPT Plus and Teams members only. Additionally, all those who signed up for early access to SearchGPT will get access to the search function. 

What about ChatGPT free users?

In the words of OpenAI, “We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months.” That means ChatGPT Search would be inaccessible for the foreseeable future. 

What remains to be seen is whether OpenAI makes the free version of ChatGPT Search as capable as the one that’s available for paid members. Will OpenAI resort to advertisements to keep the search engine business profitable like Google? 

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