OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google's dominance of the online search market. SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. OpenAI said SearchGPT is a temporary prototype that will combine the company's AI models, such as ChatGPT, with the ability to search the internet. It will respond conversationally to searches, while providing up-to-date information with "clear links to relevant sources".

Microsoft (MSFT) is going all in on ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that could power a new search engine that could disrupt the dominance of Google (GOOG). News site Semafor reported on Tuesday that Microsoft is investing $10bn (£8.2bn) in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm that launched the AI generative tool ChatGPT in November 2022. This will value the San Francisco-based firm at $29bn, and industry analysts say that Google should pay close attention to the deal. Microsoft spends billions of dollars every year to try to compete with Google's search engine dominance, but with comparatively low user interaction on Bing they have failed for over a decade. Microsoft has so far failed to replicate the algorithm that powers Google search but if they incorporate the AI generating power of ChatGPT into Bing, or a new search engine, this could be "a game changer", an industry commentator has suggested.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is using machine learning to extract metadata from text, podcasts and other forms of media, making them easier to find via a new search engine. Machine learning engineer Gareth Seneque told the YOW! Data 2019 conference that the ABC moved out of beta in February this year with a new search engine based on technology from US startup Algolia (which also runs search for the likes of Twitch and Stripe). The search domain still sports beta labelling but is in full production use. "There are reasons for [the url] behind the scenes - stuff involving CMS migrations and the like that I won't detour into - but we're very much in the scaling up and out phase of things," Seneque said. But Seneque said user feedback on search was poor. "Specifically, content types were not supported, indexing speeds were slow stuff as the stuff would take a while to show up in the index, and the relevance of results was poor," he said.

Google changed the world with its PageRank algorithm, creating a new kind of internet search engine that could instantly sift through the world's online information and, in many cases, show us just what we wanted to see. But that was a long time ago. As the volume of online documents continues to increase, we need still newer ways of finding what we want. That's why Google is now running its search engine with help from machine learning, augmenting its predetermined search rules with deep neural networks that can learn to identify the best search results by analyzing vast amounts of existing search data. Microsoft is pushing its Bing search engine in the same direction, and so are others beyond the biggest names in tech.

It's possible using Dreambit, a face-swapping search engine that automatically analyzes any photo you upload and figures out how to crop it into images you search for. Your results incorporate your face, cropped and colorized and adapted to the images you receive. It sure does beat the heck out of doing it all manually. Created by computer vision researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman at the University of Washington, Dreambit is an interesting tool that can and will be used for tons of silly applications, but the serious implications it has are infinite as well. In a press release, Shlizerman noted how the engine could be used in missing persons cases as it can adapt how victims in said cases can change their looks over time. Dreambit will be on display at SIGGRAPH next week, but unfortunately it's not available to the public just yet.

Search engines that aren't Google rarely have much that's interesting to offer to the average consumer. But Omnity, a new search engine aimed at researchers -- or even just students doing their homework -- offers some glimmers of something new that make it worth taking notice. Search, as we know it, is ripe for some sort of change, after all. Google is certainly working to bake search more fully into our cars, phones and other devices. Specialized search engines -- for flights, places to stay, even .gifs And then there are those AI bots being promised by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.