ChatGPT Search, the AI-powered search engine developed by OpenAI, offers an intriguing glimpse into the future of web searching. However, after testing the product for a day, Maxwell Zeff found that it struggles with the short, navigational queries that make up the bulk of searches on Google, often providing unreliable or irrelevant results.
While ChatGPT Search excels at answering longer, research-oriented questions by scraping multiple websites and presenting concise answers, it falls short in replacing Google for everyday web navigation. Zeff suggests that this limitation may be due to ChatGPT’s reliance on Microsoft Bing and the inherent challenges large language models face when dealing with short prompts. Despite these shortcomings, both OpenAI and competitor Perplexity are working to improve their AI search products to better handle short queries and potentially rival Google in the future.