What are the features of SearchGPT, Open AI’s new search engine to challenge Google?
Sam Altman’s Open AI is challenging tech giant Google with the announcement of a new search engine that could end the latter’s hegemony. What is SearchGPT?
After successfully launching ChatGPT, OpenAI’s latest goal is to challenge tech giant Google with a new product: SearchGPT. CEO Sam Altman’s company aims to compete with the world’s most popular search engine by taking advantage of the recent popularity of its brand. Here are several features of SearchGPT and what sets it apart from Google and other search engines.
OpenAI’s new SearchGPT aims to overthrow Google and its search engine: all the details
SearchGPT is a search engine still in the prototype phase from OpenAI that uses artificial intelligence to deliver quick, conversational responses to its users about their searches, with clear source attribution at all times.
The main difference from other engines such as Google would be the way of presenting the requested information: while Google shows it to you as a list of links, SearchGPT shows its suggestions structured as part of a conversation.
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The new OpenAI product aims to revolutionize the search engine market. While conventional products like Google or Bing simply give users a series of links based on their searches, SearchGPT uses learning models such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o to improve the user experience and combine real-time searches with its AI capabilities.
Broadly speaking, OpenAI's goals with SearchGPT are as follows:
- Clearly establish the source of the requested information.
- Display information that is always up-to-date and in real time.
- Display questions related to entered searches that can provide more context and greater understanding for the user.
- Sponsorships and collaborations with editors to ensure there are no errors when citing content.
SearchGPT is currently restricted to a group of 10,000 users, and this testing phase will allow the engine to improve in preparation for a global launch. The company also says it plans to implement the best aspects of SearchGPT into ChatGPT to optimize the user experience.
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How will OpenAI’s new SearchGPT affect SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is an essential part of businesses that operate on the internet, including websites and social networks. Given how SearchGPT works, its success against Google would imply a radical change in current SEO strategies, which, in any case, are transformed every few months in response to changes in the algorithms of the Alphabet search engine.
On paper, good practices when publishing content on the Internet would be rewarded, with higher priority given to quality, carefully produced and well-structured content and penalizing plagiarized and hastily produced content. This change would be mainly a consequence of OpenAI’s AIs as language learning models, giving great importance to coherent grammatical and semantic structures and, again, penalizing all content that does not make sense.
Another major factor that differentiates it from other search engines that use AI is that SearchGPT establishes in real time where the information it offers comes from, this being one of the major weaknesses of similar products such as AI Overviews from Google itself or Perplexity, criticized for the way they attribute the authorship of the content shown.
Although SearchGPT’s success remains to be seen, it appears to be likely, at least to investors in the stock market. The announcement of the new search engine caused shares of Alphabet - Google’s parent company - to fall by 2.5%.