OpenAI recently released ChatGPT Search, an AI-powered search engine that competes directly with Google. While the internet is an ocean filled with gazillion bytes of data, we still use the term ‘I’ll just Google it,’ which signifies its dominance and even Microsoft failed to beat it with Bing. However, OpenAI has shaken the online world in the last two years with its AI prowess, which made me curious about its new product.
So is ChatGPT Search the long-awaited competitor for Google Search or is it just another ambitious Yahoo Search? Here’s my experience.
ChatGPT Search: New But Not Innovative
You can access ChatGPT Search in two ways. One way is by opening the chatgpt.com website and using the ‘Search the web’ button manually. The second way is to install the ChatGPT Search extension on your browser. This allows you to directly enter your search query in the address bar, which will be answered by ChatGPT Search.
While the latter is easier to use, it comes with a drawback; the extension sets ChatGPT Search as your default search engine. So anything you enter in the address bar will be answered by OpenAI and it can be frustrating at times if you are used to a quick Google Search directly from the address bar.
ChatGPT Search is currently only available to paid subscribers and approved users from the waitlist. I spent some time with the tool and compared my experience with Google Search. Here is my finding:
Starting with basic questions such as ‘Man of the match in last Ind vs NZ test match,’ ChatGPT Search gave me direct answers in a single paragraph and provided the source of the information as a citation. Google, on the other hand, bombarded me with multiple links to news articles, which I had to manually open to get to my answer.
So ChatGPT 1, Google 0. Good start for OpenAI, right? Not Really!
OpenAI uses its GPT-4o model to refine search results from the internet and produce them as output in ChatGPT Search. However, the company has partnered with top-rated media agencies like Reuters, Financial Times, Associated Press, etc. to display results from these websites on priority.
The idea sounds good as these are huge media publications with verified sources, making their information more reliable. However, this also means that you are less likely to get search results from not-so-popular sources, small publications, or any other source that offers a unique or counter perspective.
This somewhat defeats the purpose of a search engine, whose job is to answer your question and provide you with all possibly related results for your search query.
Based on my experience with ChatGPT Search so far, it only provides a single-paragraph answer based on one source. I also found that it was constantly trying to fetch results from selective websites.
For queries that can be answered in a single sentence, this is not a problem. But when you try to search for listicle-based questions, such as ‘Top phone brands in India‘ or something like ‘Best cars under Rs 10 lakh in India,‘ this behaviour suddenly becomes a problem.
In such cases, instead of searching the internet and compiling the best results, ChatGPT Search selects a certain website and displays content from it in a summarized manner. Hence, you are limited to the results provided by that one particular website. You do not have much control to explore other sources, compared to simply opening a new web page in Google Search.
Final Thoughts
ChatGPT Search works great. It is fast, efficient, and tries a new approach to show you simplified results. However, the concept doesn’t delve into the context for better results.
I also agree that Google Search results have not been the best recently and you are more likely to face an SEO-optimized web page instead of helpful results. But Google still does a better job because it lets you switch to a different source if you are not satisfied with the result.
Google’s ability to rank less-popular pages for topics around a certain niche, the ease of sourcing out to external platforms such as Reddit for certain discussion-related topics, and the overall relevancy of search results are far better than ChatGPT Search. Even Bing does a better job.
ChatGPT Search is a great concept. But for now, I am sticking to Google for my daily internet searches!
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