OpenAI recently released ChatGPT Search which allows ChatGPT to search the web when answering user questions. Instead of being limited to knowledge available at the time of training, ChatGPT can now incorporate current information from the web and include links to its sources.
The search feature uses a modified version of GPT-4o which was fine-tuned using model distillation. Internet searches are performed by third party engines, including Bing, and OpenAI has partnered directly with select content publishers to provide content such as news and weather. The bot may choose to include search results based on the user's prompt, or the user can manually force a web search via a UI button. According to OpenAI,
ChatGPT search connects people with original, high-quality content from the web and makes it part of their conversation. By integrating search with a chat interface, users can engage with information in a new way, while content owners gain new opportunities to reach a broader audience. We hope to help users discover publishers and websites, while bringing more choice to search.
OpenAI prototyped the feature, known originally as SearchGPT, earlier this year, giving access to selected users. They also partnered with selected publishers, giving them tools to "manage how they appear in SearchGPT." OpenAI claims that websites can surface their content in search results but still opt out of having their data used in training models. The OpenAI docs list user agents and IP address ranges for their different web crawlers that site admins can reference in their robots.txt files.
Wharton professor and AI researcher Ethan Mollick posted on X about his experience with ChatGPT Search, saying:
AI web search on ChatGPT works entirely differently than doing a Google search, and requires different instincts. It also still hallucinates. When I ask a question that I know something about, I get different answers every time, with varying quality. Citations are a weak point. I am sure it will improve, but AI search is good for entirely different things than web search, at least for now.
In a Hacker News discussion about the release, several users wondered about the value proposition of using a chatbot for web search, for someone who has "decent search skills." One user replied:
I think it’s pretty clear that LLMs can process a document/article/web page faster than any human in order to answer a given question. (And it can be parallelized across multiple pages at once too). The main hard part of searching isn’t formulating queries to write in the Google search bar, it’s clicking on links, and reading/skimming until you find the specific answer you want.
Other major AI players have incorporated web search capabilities into LLMs, notably Microsoft and Google. Google's Gemini chatbot can include "sources and related content within and below its response" from search results. Microsoft's Bing Copilot feature uses an OpenAI-powered LLM to summarize search results. Earlier this year, InfoQ covered the release of Meta's Llama 3.1 405B LLM, which included tools for web search.
ChatGPT Search is now available to all ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as users on the SearchGPT waitlist. OpenAI plans to extend access to Free users "over the coming months."
