Google has enjoyed complete dominance over the internet search market for decades. There have been competitors but none has been able to achieve the sheer scale of its superiority. With artificial intelligence set to fundamentally change the way people use the internet, it appears that Google may soon find its lead under threat.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is reportedly working on a new internet search engine. You can already look up stuff using ChatGPT, the AI model scrapes the internet to give you an answer, but this new online experience would function as a more conventional search engine.
Details on OpenAI's new search engine are slim at the moment
The Information reports that OpenAI is working on a “web search product,” and that it may be aligned with Microsoft's Bing initially. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI so it's not surprising they'd be working together on a product that could threaten Google's dominance.
There's not a lot of detail about this new web search product at this point in time, so it's unclear if it's going to exist as part of ChatGPT or as a new standalone product. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can already use a Browse with Bing feature, so it remains to be seen just how different this will be from that experience.
Perplexity is another conversational search engine that's giving users another way to look up information on the internet without having to rely on Google. As AI advances, there will likely be other contenders, but so far OpenAI is in a good position to take on Google with a search engine. It has proven its capabilities, has major investors onboard, Microsoft is one of its closest collaborators, so it ultimately comes down to what's OpenAI's end goal with this.
