Overview of SearchGPT
SearchGPT is an AI-powered search engine developed by OpenAI that can access information from across the internet in real time. It combines traditional search engine technology with the latest AI technology, creating a new generation of search engines. Now, this product is currently in a limited beta test, and you can apply for a trial on the official website.
It is worth noting that the AI search engine product model was not first introduced by OpenAI. Another prominent tech startup, Perplexity AI, was the first to gain a large number of users and favorable reviews in this product direction. Although the tech community and media often criticize products like Perplexity AI for relying on OpenAI or Google technology with low technical moats of their own, the fact that OpenAI, a star AI company, is also pushing in this direction indicates that this product direction has been recognized by mainstream tech companies.
Advantages Compared to Traditional Search Engines
1.Designed to Give You an Answer, Not Several Results
Unlike Google or Bing, where you enter a keyword and get a results page with a list of relevant content that you have to click on, AI search engines like SearchGPT prioritize giving you an answer based on your keyword. For some search scenarios, you can get more relevant results faster, saving your search time.
The image below shows the result of searching "when can I see nudibranchs in Half Moon Bay this weekend" in SearchGPT.
2.More Relevant Search Results
AI search engines can provide more relevant search results. Part of this comes from the AI model's better understanding of your search queries and online content.
Another important reason is that AI search engines can have continuous memory conversations like humans. Through such conversations, AI search engines can better understand your search intentions and thus are more likely to provide more relevant search results.
Below is the search result generated from a follow-up question to my initial query.
3.Richer Search Result Presentation
AI search engines can quickly provide a search answer based on this single piece of data, presenting search results in the form of mind maps, PPTs, PDF documents, which traditional search engines cannot do.
Don't underestimate this capability. I know an AI search engine developer whose mind map feature was immediately praised by some users upon launch, resulting in significant user growth and long-term word-of-mouth spread. Later, he included this capability in subscription plan, and some customers were willing to pay for it.
The image below shows the mind map presentation capability of the AI search engine Thinkany.
From the current SearchGPT promotional video and beta user trials, it does not yet have this capability, but it will certainly have it in the future.
Advantages Compared to Other Search Engines
1.Much faster
Since most other AI search engines call OpenAI or deploy open-source AI large language models to call AI capabilities, their response speed can not match that of an AI search engine directly made by OpenAI. In fact, this is the case, as a beta user on X tested SearchGPT and praised its very fast generation speed.
2.Potentially Better Search Results
As mentioned earlier, many AI search engines rely on OpenAI's capabilities. Although their teams have the ability to fine-tune models and have received some positive reviews, the OpenAI team's understanding and fine-tuning capabilities of the underlying model are not on the same level as theirs.
It is said that OpenAI does not directly use existing Google results as the data source like other AI search engines but builds a set of web content indexes more suitable for AI search engines. This work is extremely large and complex, but in the long term, controlling these web indexes themselves can better control the search results of AI search engines.
An X user with not many followers searched for his name on SearchGPT and Perplexity AI. SearchGPT gave the correct result, but Perplexity did not find it.
3.Foundation for Ecological Cooperation
SearchGPT's official announcement specifically mentioned exploring better collaboration with content publishers and creators during the beta period. If OpenAI can handle issues related to copyright, abuse, and benefit distribution with original content providers, it will be a huge product moat.
Because one long-standing criticism of AI search engines is that they directly use content creators' content without giving any benefit to the creators. While this is not a major issue when AI search engines' market share is not large, it will undoubtedly cause huge controversy once AI search engines' share overtakes traditional search engines.
If You Want to Learn More About SearchGPT and AI Search Engines
1.Try Deploying Open Source Projects
If you are a developer, you can try deploying AI search engines to gain more insight.
https://github.com/leptonai/search_with_lepton
2.Use AI Search Engine Products More
Here are three AI search engines I often use, each with its own characteristics that you can try:
- Perplexity
- ThinkAny
- Genspark
Outlook for SearchGPT and OpenAI
OpenAI has started developing AI search engines, leveraging its strong technical capabilities and inherent advantages. This will likely first impact the market share of existing AI search engine products. Whether it will truly affect Google's market share remains to be seen. However, based on current product data from AI search engines, it has indeed brought new product experiences and attracted a group of loyal customers. We have reason to believe that it could potentially spark a new platform ecosystem in the future.
Whether SearchGPT can become the ultimate winner in this ecosystem is not certain. After all, OpenAI's previously launched plugin store and GPTs store were highly anticipated, but the results did not meet market expectations. OpenAI has proven itself to be a technologically powerful company, but it still needs to prove that it can create better platform products and successfully operate a platform ecosystem.
One picture to summarize about SearchGPT
About Us
We are an AI audio team planning to develop AI-based audio recognition, audio generation, and audio search in the future. This is our current text-to-speech generator based on TikTok popular sounds. welcome to use it:TikTok Voice
