It might not seem like the world needs another search engine but ChatGPT thinks it does and it has brewed up something that doesn't act like your grandfather's search engine.
ChatGPT Search is now part of the ChatGPT Chatbox and it claims to be able to deliver a vast store of information from the internet, including news, sports, stock prices and so forth.
This may not sound very exciting. After all, we already have search engines from Google, Microsoft and Duck Duck Go, among many others. The primary difference seems to be that when you ask ChatGPT for information about, let's say, why so many people are moving to North Dakota, you may get a screenful of information, complete wiith bullet points and subheads, instead of just a list of links.
This is not entirely a new idea. Google and Microsoft Bing have been moving in that direction but usually with just a few short paragraphs in boxes alongside the regular results. ChatGPT delivers more in-depth information, similar to what you would get by prompting ChatGPT to tell you all it knows about North Dakota.
Doesn't sound too interesting? Maybe not, so we decided to try it. We went to ChatGPT and asked for last night's basketball scores. Here's what we got:
Google delivered something similar but Blink and DDG just coughed up links to the NBA schedule.
Available now
The new search is available now for people who already use ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month. A free version will arrive "over the coming months," the company said.
I played around with it for awhile and found it so similar to "regular" ChatGPT's Chatbox that I found it hard to tell the difference. But, leaving aside technical jargon, I think it's pretty handy for somone just looking for a quick overview.
To really drill down into a topic, most serious researchers may continue to use an "old" search engine like Google, since it displays a list of sources of widely varying value. Those who are picky about their info may prefer to pick the links that look most reliable.
“ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before,” OpenAI said in a blog post. “You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for.”
But like all AI services, this one needs to be used carefully. AI bots can sometimes have old information and they are also known to "hallucinate," which means just what it sounds like. They can sort of dream things up and have trouble deciding whether they're real or not.
You know, just like humans.