At the end of July, following months of rumours, and an even longer time period of speculation that it was an inevitable progression, OpenAI announced its AI-powered search engine: SearchGPT. In an interview from March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had pondered whether “maybe there’s just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesise information” – a fairly implicit challenge to the monopoly of Google – and this is evidently what SearchGPT will try to achieve. The stated goal is to eventually integrate the search functionality into ChatGPT.
The demonstration of the prototype has left interested parties with multiple questions but perhaps the most significant is how will it be any different to Google, and what will be the motivation for web users to switch their search engine?
Visually, the key difference between traditional search, and what SearchGPT hopes to achieve, is the results page that users will be presented with. A SearchGPT query will provide a textual answer, (hopefully) succinctly addressing your question, as opposed to the list of URLs that web users are well accustomed with. Crucially, there will be an increased focus on source attribution – a common complaint of ChatGPT and other large language models is the opacity with which they source information and the inability to verify the truth of what is being presented. SearchGPT will provide clear citing and linking to the original sources of information, allowing browsers to confirm the content and evaluate its credibility. While this will not bring an end to hallucinations (teaser videos from the launch were ridiculed for some of the inaccuracies they displayed) it will bring an increased level of accountability to results and allow users to check they have not been given a useless answer.
Conversational tone
Users of LLMs will be familiar with the conversational tone with which queries are responded to, and they can expect the same from SearchGPT, which will retain the ability for users to refine questions and ask follow ups. It is this user experience which perhaps presents the biggest contrast to traditional search: scrolling through multiple results, browsing multiple URLs to obtain and verify information – these are the tasks which SearchGPT is looking to eliminate. If the engine operates as envisaged, it will be more akin to an assistant providing answers, than as the research tool that current search engines are. The demonstration also revealed a ‘visual answers’ feature but it is not entirely clear how that works at the moment.
An ad-free experience
Another significant deviation from traditional search engines is the presence of ads: for now, SearchGPT won’t have them, or at least doesn’t appear to. At this time, SearchGPT will be available to those who are already paying $20 a month for access to the GPT-4o model, which is how it will fund itself in the short term, but this raises some interesting points. From a user experience perspective, this could be a significant motivation for switching. Ad-supported products are often viewed more sceptically and as digital literacy increases and people become more aware of their digital footprint, the prospect of an ad-free experience is increasingly valuable and desirable. What is more, there will be less visible evidence that the results you are being presented with have been influenced by the highest bidder. However, the longevity and sustainability of this financial approach must come into question. Data training, hosting, and interference costs are likely to become, if they are not already, significant financial burdens for OpenAI and it is unclear whether they can get enough users to sign up to the paid service.
Catalyst for innovation
Google has developed its own version of SearchGPT, ‘AI Overviews’, that aims to deliver a very similar experience as the one promised by SearchGPT, but observers have noted that the company has previously been slow in its shift to integrating Generative AI. This is, arguably, understandable, given that Google stands to lose far more from releasing a faulty product, not only from a reputational point of view, but also because of the vast computing resources required to power Generative AI. Despite this, the emergence of such a distinct and powerful challenger, even though it is still just a prototype, has evidently increased Google’s own drive to deliver a new product.
While it is not clear what the future holds for SearchGPT, one thing that can be said with confidence is that the emergence of SearchGPT has been the catalyst for accelerated innovation in the search engine market. Even if the near total monopoly of the search engine enjoyed by Google has not yet been broken, users may be able to benefit from the initial challenge, as each company races to provide the best features at the most competitive price. This opens the prospect of new search paradigms and shifting user behaviour, possibly changing user interfaces dramatically from what we currently experience. This development is one that will need to be closely monitored from a reputational point of view, and individuals and companies will need to be keenly aware of the information available online about them, as users possibly shift from researching topics themselves to being delivered answers sourced by machines.
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