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Don’t panicPichai’s message. He claims that even in the age of AI Reviews, people will still want to click and go deeper for many types of searches. “The basic principle is that people come in search of information. “They don’t always Google just to get an answer,” he says. “Sometimes yes, but the vast majority of the time you look at it as a starting point.”
Reid, meanwhile, argues that because AI Previews allow people to ask more complicated questions and dig deeper into what they want, they could even be helpful to some types of publishers and small businesses, especially those working in niches: “You basically you reach a new audience, because people can now be more specific about what they want, so someone who specializes doesn’t have to rank for a generic query.”
“I’m going to start with something risky,” Nick Turley tells me from within the Zoom window. Turley is the product manager for ChatGPT, and he’s been touting OpenAI’s new web search tool a few weeks before launch. “Under normal circumstances I should try this sooner, but I’ll just look you up,” he says. “This is always a very risky demonstration because people tend to pay attention to what is said about them online.”
He types my name into the search field, and the prototype search engine returns a few sentences, almost like a biography of the speaker. It accurately identifies me and my current role. It even points out a particular story I wrote years ago that I’m probably most familiar with. In short, that’s the right answer. Phew?
A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing responses from its language model with information from around the web. If the model thinks an answer would benefit from up-to-date information, it will automatically run a web search (OpenAI won’t say who its search partners are) and include those answers in its answer, with links if you want to learn more. You can also manually force it to search the web if it doesn’t do it on its own. OpenAI won’t disclose how many people use its web search, but it says about 250 million people use ChatGPT per week, all of whom are potentially exposed.
“There is an incredible amount of content on the web. A lot of things happen in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its responses and be a better super-assistant.”
Kevin Weil, Product Director, OpenAI
According to Fishkin, these newer forms of AI-powered search aren’t yet challenging Google’s search dominance. “It doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing classic forms of web search,” he says.
OpenAI insists that it’s not really trying to compete in search—though, frankly, this seems like an expectation setting to me. Instead, it says, web search is mainly a means of obtaining more current information than the data in the training models, which typically have specific cut-off dates that are often months, or even years or more, in the past. As a result, while ChatGPT may be great at explaining how the West Coast offense works, it has long been useless at telling you what the 49ers’ last score is. No more.
“I’m coming at it from the perspective of ‘How can we make ChatGPT able to answer every question you have? How can we make it more useful for you on a daily basis?’ And that’s where search comes in,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s product director, tells me. “There is an incredible amount of content on the web. A lot of things happen in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use this to improve its responses and be a better super-assistant.”
