Search will become available for free ChatGPT users “over the coming months.”
You can access search at chatgpt.com and on the desktop and mobile apps.
How it works. According to OpenAI:
“The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT search leverages third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners, to provide the information users are looking for.”
One of those third-party search providers is Microsoft Bing. Based on its ChatGPT search help document, OpenAI is sharing search query and location data with Microsoft.
Chrome Extension. You can make ChatGPT your default search engine on Chrome by downloading this Chrome Extension.
More to come. OpenAI said it plans to improve the search experience for shopping and travel queries.
What they’re saying. Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, told the Washington Post (subscription required):
“We think it improves relevancy and decreases hallucinations, because of the ability to go out to the web.”
SearchGPT. We were expecting OpenAI to integrate SearchGPT into ChatGPT search at some point this year. For now, at least, it seems SearchGPT, announced in July, will live on as an experimental search prototype – perhaps where new ChatGPT search features are tested.
The announcement. Introducing ChatGPT search