OpenAI starts testing SearchGPT prototype, here’s what it looks like

OpenAI today announced SearchGPT, its long-awaited search product.

• SearchGPT is a “temporary prototype” and limited to just 10,000 users and publishers at launch.
• OpenAI plans to integrate the “best” parts of the new search features directly within ChatGPT in the future.

How SearchGPT works. SearchGPT responds to queries using its AI models plus information pulled from the web. It will include links to relevant sources, OpenAI explained in a blog post.

OpenAI is teasing SearchGPT like this:

• “A prototype of new search features, using the strength of our AI models to give you fast answers with clear and relevant sources.”

What SearchGPT looks like. It looks fairly similar to what it has been doing since the arrival of GPT-4o – what is known as “browse mode.” OpenAI shared some videos of the “faster and easier” SearchGPT experience:

• It starts with a search box asking you, “What are you searching for.”
• After entering your query, SearchGPT will provide an answer that includes links to sources within the text answers and shows sources beneath the answer.
• Additional results will be shown in a sidebar.

Here’s a search for [music festivals in Boone, NC in August 2024]:

Here’s a search for [best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota]:

OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI has a new crawler, OAI-SearchBot. From its documentation:

• “OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in the SearchGPT prototype. It is not used to crawl content to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. To help ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing OAI-Searchbot in your site’s robots.txt file and allowing requests from our published IP ranges.”

For publishers. OpenAI is “launching a way for publishers to manage how they appear in SearchGPT, so publishers have more choices. Importantly, SearchGPT is about search and is separate from training OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Sites can be surfaced in search results even if they opt out of generative AI training.”

Coming soon. OpenAI said it plans to improve searches related to local information and commerce.

Waitlist. You can join the SearchGPT waitlist here.

The OpenAI search story so far. We first heard about OpenAI’s plan for a search product in February. Rumors heated up in May – but OpenAI didn’t launch its search product (GPT-4o launched instead). Then, earlier this month, The Atlantic CEO confirmed that OpenAI was “going to build a search product.”

Why we care. The next Google won’t do what Google does, as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made it clear he has no interest in copying Google Search – but creating a new user-friendly search that combines LLMs and search without drowning you in advertising. While it’s too early to know whether ChatGPT will become a Google Search killer, this is clearly a story we’ll be watching closely over the coming months and years.

Update: OopsGPT. Well, it turns out that SearchGPT had an “oopsie moment” in one of its demo videos, much like Google’s infamous Bard demo. The SearchGPT error happened on a search for [music festivals in boone north carolina in august], as The Atlantic (one of OpenAI’s big partners) pointed out in an article:

“The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)