OpenAI chose to celebrate Halloween in a most unusual way. The company surprised everyone by giving ChatGPT users access to its SearchGPT online search tool. That’s a great trick or treat, one I certainly didn’t expect to hit my inbox on Thursday afternoon.
But you know what’s even more exciting than using ChatGPT to search the web? The ability to perform searches in your ChatGPT chat history to retrieve old conversations. That’s right, the feature is available right away in ChatGPT and should significantly improve your experience with the chatbot.
I signed up for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search (SearchGPT) test long ago, but I wasn’t expecting to get access anytime soon. That’s because new AI features take even longer to reach Europe, where I live.
But OpenAI made launched SearchGPT in all regions, apparently. All I needed to do to see whether the feature was enabled in Europe was to refresh the ChatGPT web page. Sure enough, the new search icon appeared in the ChatGPT prompt field, as seen below.
The feature will also be available in OpenAI’s desktop and mobile apps, which is exactly what you’d want from the feature.
But something else caught my eye in the updated ChatGPT user interface. There is now a new magnifying glass in the top left corner, which I mistook for SearchGPT at first. That’s the icon you associate with online searches, so I thought that’s where OpenAI put it.
Little did I know that the magnifying glass meant something else. It’s the “search chats” feature I’ve been dying to see in ChatGPT since my early days with the chatbot. Until this week, the only way to search ChatGPT for older chats was to just scroll your history. If you remember the title of a particular search, you could use the browser search tool to look for it, but even that involved some scrolling.
I’m sure I’m not the only ChatGPT user with this problem. I often want to revisit chats and continue talking to the chatbot on some topics. That’s the whole point of having the ChatGPT chat history available on desktop and mobile. I’m also pretty sure I must have started duplicate conversations with the chatbot on some topics rather than searching for the original one.
Since I’m using ChatGPT for marathon training tips, I have multiple marathon-related chats with the AI. Thanks to the new “search chat” feature, I can finally find them.
As you can see in the following screenshot, the search tool will search both the chat title and the actual chat for specific keywords. I’ve used only “marathon” in this example, but I could further refine my search to find what I need.
OpenAI has a support document that offers more details about the new “search chat” functionality. The company says the feature will let you find content in archived chats, but it will no longer retrieve older chats if you delete them from history.
The simultaneous rollout of ChatGPT Search and the “search chat” functionality can’t be coincidental. I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI uses similar tech to perform searches inside ChatGPT chat history and the web.
Whatever the case, I’m happy to see the “search chats” feature go live in ChatGPT. As for the ChatGPT online search functionality, that’s a topic for a different day. I haven’t even started testing it in earnest.