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You can finally rediscover that great ChatGPT conversation from months ago

You can finally rediscover that great ChatGPT conversation from months ago

ChatGPT conversations can add up quickly if you chat regularly with the AI chatbot. However, it's been difficult to find a particular discussion with ChatGPT, even with well-labeled thread names. OpenAI has released a new search feature for ChatGPT to solve that problem. The feature allows you to browse past conversations by looking for specific terms, making it much easier to find parts you don't entirely remember or retrieve old threads without having to dig into the thread list.

The search tool is only available to those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus or Teams for now, although free users are supposed to be able to use it starting next month. To use the search tool, just click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the ChatGPT sidebar. Type the word or phrase you want to find and the AI chatbot will review your history to locate specific messages. If you have particularly long chat threads, that could save you a lot of time.

We're starting to roll out the ability to search your chat history on the ChatGPT web. Now you can quickly and easily open a chat to check it out or continue a chat where you left off. pic.twitter.com/YVAOUpFvzJOctober 29, 2024

ChatGPT Search, not SearchGPT

Hearing the term search used with the term ChatGPT immediately reminds me of SearchGPT, the rather imperfect web search feature that OpenAI introduced this summer. The new tool is more like searching a documents folder or perhaps an email inbox.

And although OpenAI didn't explicitly mention it, it would make sense for the search tool to learn from your interactions in the same way it does from your conversations. That could mean improving awareness of the type of conversation history you're likely to search for and perhaps filtering the results.

The search feature isn't exactly revolutionary, but it at least puts ChatGPT on par with some of its rivals like Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. It fits in with some of ChatGPT's other quality of life improvements, including a better chat interface, autocomplete suggestions, and the use of “/” to immediately command ChatGPT to search online or generate images.