When OpenAI introduced SearchGPT, the demos suggested that everything about how people search for things online would immediately change forever. But, when examples of the AI search engine in operation proved to be somewhat flawed, the feeling of embarrassment turned to “wow, that’s embarrassing.” The challenge to Google’s reign as search engine king is still under review.
According to a new article in The Washington PostSearchGPT is still unsure of the facts. Google may not have to worry about losing its digital search throne anytime soon, even as it moves at breakneck speed to implement its own AI-powered search tools.
The problems aren’t hard to understand. SearchGPT is supposed to combine OpenAI’s AI models with real-time web data to yield faster, more accurate answers. Questions and keywords return a summary of the requested information rather than standard Google links. It can be fast and informative. Unfortunately for OpenAI, that initial mistake is actually starting to look more like the rule than the exception. Mail As noted, early testers saw SearchGPT claim that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was going to speak at a tech conference in the near future that he wasn't actually planning to attend. That's as bad a hallucination as anything ChatGPT made up.
Even if SearchGPT was guaranteed to tell the truth, it wouldn't be much comfort when it has no way to answer your questions. Evidence shared with the Mail In particular, SearchGPT’s ability to help with local information was disparaged. That information has to come from somewhere. Google’s decades of refined data on a vast number of businesses and the products and services they offer make it very easy to find most of the information people might want about the places around them. And if there’s something it doesn’t already have in its databanks, its partners and subsidiaries can likely fill it in for them. SearchGPT and OpenAI don’t have that database access, so the answers are either nonsense or nothing at all.
AI Search Groups
OpenAI’s prominence in the AI scene makes SearchGPT stand out, but the idea of mixing AI and search is hardly unique. Google’s aforementioned ambitions include AI Overviews and answers relayed by its Gemini AI assistant. Of course, Google’s AI search tools have faced their own issues, with advice occasionally bizarre and downright dangerous. Not that that’s stopped Google from going global with AI Overviews after a few revisions.
OpenAI remains cautious and has only released SearchGPT to a very limited number of users. Those eager to experience how generative AI models can transform online search have other options from well-funded startups trying other strategies. Perplexity AI is one of the most prominent. Rather than creating an AI model and then grafting it onto a search engine system, Perplexity leverages existing models created by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other developers. Perplexity avoids hallucinations by putting in stricter guardrails and insisting on including links to support what the AI writes, an innovation it adopted very early on. Perplexity built its own web index while still using Google and Bing to fill in the gaps, while SearchGPT apparently relies more heavily on external data. The result is a more structured approach that avoids some of the errors that supposedly plague SearchGPT.
Google’s long-adopted approach to search doesn’t seem likely to face any formidable opponents for now, not even from within itself. No matter who is building an AI search engine, it will need to at least come close to matching Google’s speed, precision, and accuracy to appeal to the Google-loving world. Considering the years and billions of dollars it took Google to reach its current heights, OpenAI might need to be a little more patient or a lot more lavish in spending to do the same. And those resources will likely require more than just ChatGPT’s subscriber base to pull it off.
The hurdles facing SearchGPT highlight the broader challenges facing generative AI tools when trying to compete with established search engines. While AI tools like ChatGPT and SearchGPT can offer impressive conversational capabilities, they lack the deep, structured, real-time data needed to tackle everyday search queries at scale. SearchGPT may be on the right track, but finding the ideal AI search engine will require a little more research.
