ChatGPT wants to take on Google, and Microsoft with new launch

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT’s new search feature, adding to the market competition currently dominated by Google and Microsoft. While the update allows ChatGPT to conduct automatic web searches, there are still questions about its accuracy.

Meanwhile, AI remains a big theme in Q4 with Google’s continued focus.  OpenAI will also reportedly announce new launches and updates this year.

OpenAI’s SearchGPT launch will compete with tech giants

In direct competition with companies like Google, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT search. The company statement from Thursday reveals that ChatGPT would do an automatic web search to improve its response. Users can also manually activate this feature by selecting the web search icon.

While ChatGPT expands its web search capabilities across desktop and mobile apps, OpenAI says that it aims to make finding reliable information simple. The company wants to use ChatGPT’s conversational interface to make searches less time-consuming and more accurate. OpenAI will reportedly combine information from search engines and content from partner sites to give answers.

OpenAI previously tested the SearchGPT prototype, which has helped the search feature on ChatGPT. Currently, Google’s search engine dominates 90% of the market share as per Statcounter. In the category, Bing is a far second at 4%, Yandex dominates between 2-3%, and companies like Yahoo, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo have a minority share. Michael King, founder of iPullRank, notes that Google Search only drives 24X of ChatGPT’s traffic.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that search is his favorite feature so far and it has “doubled” his usage. He said, “Hard to go back to doing it the old way haha.” Privately owned Perplexity AI offers a similar search feature.

chatgpt search vs perplexity pic.twitter.com/hgcAbBOu1v

— AK (@_akhaliq) October 31, 2024

How will Google place against OpenAI?

Meanwhile, marketers are also asking how ChatGPT will rank searches. Andrea Bosoni compared Google and ChatGPT and explained that the latter often pulls information from websites already in Google’s top search results. This would mean that the SEO strategies for the two are similar. However, according to a report by The Atlantic, OpenAI’s SearchGPT is still prone to inaccuracies. Based on the report, these “hallucinations” or errors come from language models generating text without truly understanding the facts.

According to a Reddit AMA, Altman has revealed that the next update “will be worth the wait,” stating, they do not have a release plan yet. This was a response to a question on the new text-to-image model. The CEO also confirmed that this year there will be more releases on the AI front but nothing that can be called GPT-5.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai noted the company’s Q3 performance this week. He emphasized Google’s long-term focus on AI, now through a “full stack approach.” Pichai outlined AI advancements in Google Search, such as AI Overviews, Circle to Search, and Lens, which are reportedly increasing user engagement.