OpenAI’s rumored ChatGPT search engine is reportedly launching on Monday. Oh, and that happens to be a day before Google’s flagship developer conference.
Initially believed to launch on May 9 or sometime this week, now the Google Search rival is expected May 13 — right before Google I/O, according to Reuters.
What might a ChatGPT search engine be like?
A ChatGPT search engine may look like an existing Google experiment called SGE (Search Generative Experience) which provides chatbot responses at the top of the search page, followed by the traditional list of links. SGE is still in a testing ground, although it is quietly creeping into some non-testers search queries.
The original ChatGPT is already considered an alternative to a search engine. Its current knowledge cutoff date is May 2023, making it a useful resource for general information-gathering in a conversational chat interface. For a brief time, ChatGPT was connected to the internet through an integration with Microsoft Bing, but it was disabled because the chatbot was able to get past paywalled content.
This, plus an ongoing struggle between publishers and OpenAI over scraping their stories without credit or compensation has made ChatGPT’s position as an aggregator of newsworthy information controversial. Currently, OpenAI is dealing with lawsuits from The New York Times and other news outlets over plagiarism and copyright infringement, while inking licensing deals with the Axel Springer, the Financial Times, and Dotdash Meredith to use their content to train its AI models and surface information from their sites.
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Other sites have simply blocked OpenAI from crawling their pages for content to feed the company’s AI models.
How ongoing licensing disputes will impact a ChatGPT search engine — the ostensible purpose of which is to surface real-time information — remains unclear. What is clear is that OpenAI is taking a direct shot at Google. In case you’ve been living under a rock that doesn’t have internet access, Google completely dominates the search engine market. A ChatGPT search engine would be a direct attempt to compete with Google Search.
Microsoft Bing’s AI-powered search engine (now rebranded as Copilot) hasn’t really made a dent in Google’s search market dominance. But it hasn’t stopped others from trying to take Google’s crown. Perplexity AI founded by former OpenAI and Google employees is a search engine that uses a collection of LLMs, and currently has a $1 billion valuation. So OpenAI’s search engine would be competing against the old guard and new startups nipping at its heels.
And step one is upstaging Google at its own party.
