OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Search is now available for free, for everyone with an OpenAI account. Before it was only available to users who paid a subscription. OpenAI said it recently rolled out changes to make it faster and more efficient, and added a real-time interactive voice feature.
“We started the search approx two months for our paid users," said Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI. “I can't imagine ChatGPT without search now that I use it so often.”
ChatGPT Search is available globally on every platform, with mobile, desktop and web apps.
Searching ChatGPT works exactly the same as asking any other question on ChatGPT. ChatGPT will know which queries require an answer with updated information from the web and give you answers in near real time. There is also one button which forces ChatGPT to search the web although I personally don't think you'll need it.
But you'll need a ChatGPT account and you'll need to log in to get one free access to the ChatGPT Search product.
It is important to mention that there are still many challenges with searching the web through an artificial system intelligences. LLMs (large language models) don't necessarily understand your question or the nature of reality: they give possible answers, but sometimes return the wrong information.
In my experience, ChatGPT returns excellent answers for most of my daily queries. Additionally, I will often ask him to show the sources for the information he is showing so I can check that I am getting correct information. In my unofficial tests, ChatGPT beat Google Search, and one of the reasons is that Google Search is now full of paid advertisements, sponsorships, and links to other Google services, making it a much more clunky and less user-friendly tool than it used to be.
Of course, now that ChatGPT is opening up to non-paying users, we should expect to see ads soon.
