OpenAI on Monday announced the rollout of its search engine-based feature to all registered users. Dubbed ChatGPT Search, the feature enables users to find responses to their queries by providing contextual information available on the web, sourced from websites and blogs. The feature was first announced in July when a prototype called SearchGPT was released to a small group of testers. Later, the feature was rolled out to the paid subscribers of the chatbot in November. Now, the AI firm expanded the feature to even the users on the free tier of the platform.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search Is Now Available Without a Subscription
On day eight of the company’s 12-day feature shipping schedule, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Search to all users of the AI chatbot. This web search functionality is available within the chatbot’s interface and can be triggered both manually and automatically. The AI firm reportedly built its own search engine to reduce reliance on third-party search engines and circumvent issues relating to web crawling.
Once users open ChatGPT, whether on the web or mobile apps, they will see a new globe icon next to the ‘Attach file’ icon in the text field. Tapping the icon activates the web search mode, and the AI only sources data from the web instead of its pretraining and post-training knowledge base. While users can manually activate it, OpenAI highlighted that it will trigger automatically for relevant questions.
ChatGPT Search can skim through multiple websites for a query and process information from all of them to present the response in natural language. The feature also shows the source of the information in two ways. After every sentence, wherever the information was used, an icon highlights the particular source. The list of sources is also mentioned at the bottom of the response.
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of OpenAI also highlighted that the ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users will also be able to use Search with Advanced Voice mode. This will be rolled out over the next week.
Additionally, OpenAI also announced that it is adding maps to ChatGPT in the mobile apps. With this, users can search for and chat about local restaurants, businesses, and places of attraction. The AI firm claimed that the information displayed on the map will be kept up-to-date.