Goodbye Google? How to use ChatGPT’s new web search.
Watch out, Google. After a brief testing period, OpenAI is opening up its ChatGPT web search tool to all users. The rollout starts with those paying $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus, but OpenAI says it'll show up for everyone, whether they're subscribers or not, in the coming months.
Though it uses a familiar ChatGPT interface, web search works slightly differently. Rather than using its training data to generate answers, it scans the web for information that is applicable and up to date, then sifts through and summarizes all of that in response.
It means you can type all the queries you would normally plug into Google into ChatGPT instead—from "what time is the Superbowl?" to "what are the best places to visit in Florence?" Answers appear in a conversation-style interface, complete with source links, so you can jump to the websites referenced.
With Google results now regularly crammed full of spam and adverts, ChatGPT's offer promises to bring clarity and more streamlining into this experience. For the first time since Google launched, there is something arguably superior going up against it. Google has also responded in kind, beginning to add its own AI to its search engine.
Of course, there remains the problem of AI hallucinations, in that ChatGPT makes up some or all of the information in a given conversation. Given how the search tool is constantly refreshing the web to which it responds and is relying upon data from its third-party partners, this might be less a problem than typical—but something always to keep watch for nonetheless. Other concerns arise over AI power demands and bias.
How to use ChatGPT web search
If you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can get started with the web search function by opening up a chat as normal. Just ask something that would typically require a web search, like "when's the next Lakers game?", and you'll get a response back from the web-for that particular query, you'll also get info on the venue, and how to watch the game on TV.
For each prompt, ChatGPT will decide whether or not to search the web or rely on its Large Language Model (LLM) training data. If you want to force ChatGPT to run a web search no matter what the query is, click the small globe icon in the input box. Every prompt will then reference the web, until you click the icon again.
Almost anything you would previously have typed into Google works in ChatGPT too. Another example might be "what's that movie with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in it?"—you'll then see a list of movies sourced from Wikipedia. The only movie ChatGPT missed in this test was 2002's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, though to be fair to the AI, Pitt only had a brief cameo role.
OpenAI has teamed up with information providers for weather, sports, stocks, news, and maps so you can ask what the weather will be in a certain place, or simply feed it the prompt "where is the Five Guys in New York?" and watch as a map pops up. You can just ask for the headlines for the day from a particular area of the world, or in general.
All of the standard ChatGPT conversation capabilities are available, including when searching the web. You can click the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to rate the responses as good or poor, copy them to your clipboard for use later on your computer, and ask to have answers read aloud to you. Like other chats with me, chats while web-searching are kept in a memory that archives copies of the exchange, so you can refer to them again.
Checking sources and adding extensions
You may recall that Google's own efforts to inject AI into web search results hasn't been all that successful yet—with a recommendation to put glue on pizza getting quite a few headlines. One way that ChatGPT hopes to avoid those kinds of mistakes is by providing source links with answers.
And finally, at the bottom of every answer, there's a tiny arrow that brings you back to the page on which ChatGPT actually found that information. There's also an icon called Sources. Click that and you have the full list of source websites to the right, so pick any link and it takes you directly to that page. You can see, therefore, if the sites referenced by ChatGPT are the kind you believe are trustworthy or not.
According to our testing, ChatGPT web search hasn't made any 'glue on pizza' errors (Google's mishap was actually down to a rogue Reddit post). It's not always 100 percent accurate, as with the George Clooney and Brad Pitt example above, but then again articles on the web aren't always accurate: It's definitely worth double-checking information directly against trusted sources.
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