OpenAI might have aspirations to get into the search game – one that not only tests such upstart names as Perplexity but Google and Bing as well.

The company on Thursday unveiled SearchGPT, a search feature designed to give "timely answers" to questions, drawing from web sources.

UI-wise, SearchGPT's not much of a departure from the OpenAI chatbot platform, ChatGPT. You input your query, and SearchGPT strives to render relevant information and photos from the web and links to relevant sources, then you can drill down further with follow-up questions or get side suggestions for related searches.

Some queries are location-based. According to a support page by OpenAI, SearchGPT "collects and shares" general location data with third-party search providers to help provide better results-for example, identifying restaurants in the vicinity or showing today's weather. SearchGPT also allows users to share more detailed location information through a toggle in the settings menu.

Powered by OpenAI models (specifically GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and GPT-4o), SearchGPT — described as a prototype by OpenAI — is going live today for "a small group" of users and publishers. There's a waitlist here. OpenAI claims that in the future it will add certain features of SearchGPT to ChatGPT.

Getting good answers online takes a lot of work, and often requires a few attempts to get to the point," OpenAI writes in a blog post. "We think that by further improving the conversational abilities of our models using real-time information from the web, it is possible to do things much faster and easier.

It's long been rumored that OpenAI has been interested in building something of a Google killer. In February, the Information reported that a product, or at least a pilot, was in the works. But the rollout of SearchGPT happens at a rather inopportune time: as AI-powered search tools come in for justifiable criticism for plagiarism, inaccuracies, and cannibalizing content.

Google's version of AI-driven search, AI Overviews infamously suggested applying glue to a pizza. The Browser Company's Arc Search told one reporter that cut-off toes will grow back. AI search engine Genspark at one time readily recommended weapons that could be used to kill someone. And Perplexity ripped off news articles written by other outlets, including CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes, with nary a credit or attribution.

AI-generated overviews threaten to cannibalize traffic to the sites from whence they glean their information. Indeed, they already are, with one study indicating that AI Overviews could impact publisher traffic adversely to the tune of about 25% due to the de-emphasis on links to articles.

OpenAI – playing Perplexity's script to all appearances, with it ongoing tour of apology – is framing SearchGPT as the more restrained and responsible deployment.

SearchGTP "cites and links" to publishers in searches with "clear, in-line, named attribution," OpenAI says. OpenAI says it is collaborating with publishers on the design of the experience and offering a way for owners of websites to control their content's appearance in results.

“Importantly, SearchGPT is about search and is separate from training OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. Sites can be surfaced in search results even if they opt out of generative AI training,” OpenAI clarifies in the blog post. “We are committed to a thriving ecosystem of publishers and creators.”

It’s a bit tough to take a company that once scraped millions of YouTube transcripts without permission to train its models at their word. But we’ll see how the SearchGPT saga unfolds.