When it comes to search engines, Google is completely dominant with a market share of 91.1%. If you’re looking for restaurant opening hours, a list of movie theaters, the age of your favorite Olympian, the Premier League schedule, flight times, and so on…statistically, you’re starting that query on Google.com .
Other companies have tried to challenge its supreme dominance, which has generated $46 billion in revenue for the company Each yearincluding Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo.
And now the team behind ChatGPT – once the fastest-growing platform to reach 100 million monthly active users – has pledged to be the latest to offer an alternative to millions of people around the world. Called SearchGPT, it will be an artificial intelligence (AI) powered search engine with real-time access to information.
The answers will be presented in short summaries generated by the same intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that generate the answers in ChatGPT, so there is less manual work to find the answer yourself.
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Announced last week, the OpenAI team promised a selective rollout worldwide. The breakthrough not only puts the AI startup in direct competition with Google, but also with Microsoft — its single biggest investor, which has committed to spending $10 billion. Bing was recently enhanced with AI smarts from ChatGPT to help Microsoft compete with Google.
Perplexity, a brand new AI-focused search chatbot backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia, is also looking to make waves in the space and become the new default way to find information online.
Shares of Google parent Alphabet fell 3% with the announcement of new competition from the ChatGPT team. OpenAI said it has opened registrations for the new tool, which is currently in the prototype stage and is being tested with a small group of users and publishers. The company plans to integrate the best features from the search engine into ChatGPT in the future.
Unlike Google.com, which presents a list of 10 blue links from around the internet that it thinks will best answer your query… SearchGPT will act more like a conversation. The AI tool will attempt to answer your query with a single summary, drawing from information on the web in real time.
If you want more details or want to ask a follow-up question, you can continue to speak or write. SearchGPT remembers information from previous queries, so there is no need to repeat information. At any time, you will be able to click through to the website that SearchGPT used to get the information – such as making a booking, reading more details or sending a link to a friend.
This is a absolutely different from traditional Google search. Using your favorite search engine on a mobile web browser, laptop or desktop computer, after searching for the term “movie theaters showing Twisters” – every search starts from scratch. Google’s AI solution, Gemini, is capable of creating context over time, but its rollout in Google search is extremely limited so far.
Everything is presented in text bubbles, like when you’re chatting with a friend on WhatsApp.
“AI search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity reaffirm search as a content engagement model, but push Google to better its own game,” Canaccord Genuity analyst Kingsley Crane told Reuters.
OpenAI, once backed by Elon Musk, promised to give publishers access to tools to manage how their content appears in SearchGPT results. News Corp. Rupert Murdoch and The Atlantic are among the first publishing partners for SearchGPT.
SearchGPT signals closer collaboration between publishers and OpenAI, following content licensing agreements with major organizations such as the Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer.
“Newer AI search providers could face problems of their own, with Perplexity already facing pending legal action from publishers like Wired and Forbes and Condé Nast,” Crane said.
ChatGPT remains one of the fastest growing new technologies of all time, adding 100 million monthly users to its platform within weeks.
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Major search engines have been trying to integrate AI into search since ChatGPT first launched in November 2022.
Microsoft has adopted OpenAI technology for its Bing search engine through its seed investment, while Google introduced AI-based summaries to the wider public at its developer conference in May.
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Linking information in real time was not an easy task. An earlier attempt to bring updated and real information to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plugins, was canceled in April, so we’ll have to see if SearchGPT does everything the company promised.
Google’s market share hasn’t fallen below 90% since 2014. Not only is it the most popular search engine on desktops, it also dominates tablets and smartphones worldwide by similar margins.