Hello Google, ChatGPT Just Became a Travel Search Engine
Skift Take
Key Points
- ChatGPT has introduced a browser-based search engine with real-time updates and links, enhancing its capabilities beyond pre-trained data.
- The new feature allows users to plan trips with detailed itineraries, utilizing information from various travel sources.
- OpenAI's search engine poses a challenge to Google, with future plans to improve search functionalities, especially in travel and shopping.
Summary
ChatGPT has evolved into a real-time search engine, offering features like maps, weather, sports, and news. This development allows users to plan trips using detailed itineraries and poses a competitive challenge to Google's search dominance. While currently available to select users, OpenAI plans to enhance search capabilities, particularly in travel and shopping domains.
ChatGPT just became a browser-based search engine with real-time links, maps, weather, sports, stocks and news.
Real-time search is an important next step for ChatGPT, which had been training on data from a more restricted time period. There is a Chrome extension to make ChatGPT your default search engine.
There are plenty of implications for travel. I asked ChatGPT.com, “Can you plan a trip for me along California’s Pacific Coast Highway?”
It answered with a 5-day itinerary from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, pulling information and links from sources such as Californiacrossings.com, National Geographic, California.com, Travel + Leisure, and many others.
(Update: See our review of the new search tool: We Tested the Upgraded ChatGPT for a Trip to London – What Worked, What Didn’t)
“ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more,” OpenAI’s announcement stated.
“ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon.”
The new tool is available Thursday on ChatGPT.com, desktop and mobile apps for ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users. Enterprise and Edu users are slated to get the feature in the next few weeks, while free users will need to wait a few months, OpenAI said in an announcement Thursday.
The introduction of search engine functionality comes as a major challenge to Google — in the long term — although Google is developing its own product in Gemini. Google has introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of its traditional results page. There’s no advertising yet on ChatGPT.com.
Travel will be a focus of OpenAI’s search engine development. The company stated: “We plan to keep improving search, particularly in areas like shopping and travel, and leverage the reasoning capabilities of the OpenAI o1 series to do deeper research.”
Read Next
Updated May. 9, 2024
Photo Credit: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude icons seen on an iPhone. Adobe Stock / Koshiro
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