When it comes to search engines, Google is completely dominant with a jaw-dropping market share of 91.1%. If you're looking for restaurant opening times, cinema listings, the age of your favourite Olympian, the Premier League schedule, flight times, and so on, and so on ...statistically, you're starting that query on Google.com.
Other companies have tried to challenge its supreme dominance, which generated $46 billion in revenue for the company every year, including 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 — have pledged to be the latest to offer an alternative to millions of people worldwide. Dubbed SearchGPT, it will be an Artificial Intelligence-powered (AI) search engine with real-time access to information.
Answers will be presented in short summaries, generated by the same Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarts that generates responses in ChatGPT, so there's less manual work to find an answer yourself
OPENAI PRESS OFFICE
Announced last week, the team at OpenAI has promised a selective roll-out across the globe. The groundbreaking move not only puts the AI start-up firm in direct competition with Google, but it also sets them up to compete with Microsoft — its single biggest investor with a pledge to spend $10 billion. Bing was recently enhanced with AI smarts from ChatGPT to help Microsoft compete with Google.
Perplexity, a brand-new search-focused AI chatbot firm backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia, is also looking to make waves in this space and become the new default way to search for information online.
With the announcement of fresh competition from the ChatGPT team, shares of Google's parent company Alphabet dropped 3%. OpenAI said it has opened sign-ups 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 tool into ChatGPT in the future.
Unlike Google.com, which presents a list of 10 blue links from across the internet that it believes will best answer your query... SearchGPT will work more like a conversation. The AI-powered tool will attempt to answer your query with a single summary, drawing from information across the web in real time.
If you want more detail or want to ask a follow-up question, you can continue speaking or typing. SearchGPT will remember the information from previous queries, so there's no need to repeat the information. At any time, you'll be able to click through to the webpage that SearchGPT used to pull the information — to make a booking, read more detail, or send the link to a friend, for example.
This is a totally different from a traditional Google search. Using the popular search engine in a mobile web browser, laptop, or desktop PC, it's impossible to type "and which one is nearest to me" after searching for "cinemas showing Twisters" — each search starts from scratch. Google's AI solution, Gemini, is able to build context over time, but its roll-out in Google search is extremely limited for now.
Everything is presented in text bubbles, like having a conversation with a friend on WhatsApp.
"AI-powered search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity re-affirm search as a content engagement model but pressure Google to be better at its own game," Canaccord Genuity analyst Kingsley Crane told Reuters.
OpenAI, once backed by Elon Musk, has promised to hand publishers access to tools for managing how their content appears in SearchGPT results. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and The Atlantic are some of the first publishing partners for SearchGPT.
SearchGPT signals a closer collaboration between publishers and OpenAI, following content licensing agreements with major organizations like Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer.
"Newer AI-powered search providers could face challenges of their own, with Perplexity already facing pending legal action from publishers like Wired and Forbes, and Condé Nast," said Crane.
ChatGPT remains one of the fastest-growing new technologies of all-time, adding 100 million monthly users to its platform in a matter of weeks
PRESS ASSOCIATION
Major search engines have been trying to integrate AI into search since ChatGPT first launched in November 2022.
Microsoft, through its early investment, adopted OpenAI technology for its Bing search engine, while Google rolled out AI-powered summaries for the wider public at its developer conference in May.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Weaving in real-time information has not been an easy task. An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-world information into ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired in April so we'll need to see whether SearchGPT does everything the company has pledged.
Google's market share has not dipped below 90% since 2014. It's not only the most popular search engine on desktop, but also dominates by similar margins on tablets and smartphones worldwide.
