SAN FRANCISCO — ChatGPT maker OpenAI showed off a new web search product Thursday, directly challenging search giant Google and laying out its vision for how chatbots may change the way people interact with the broader web. 


The free tool, called SearchGPT, consists of a search box similar to that of a traditional search engine. Users can ask follow-up questions in a conversational tone to get more specific answers. SearchGPT will initially be available to a small group of users and publishers before eventually being integrated into ChatGPT, OpenAI said in a blog post Thursday.


Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, tech analysts have suggested that chatbots could upend the way people surf the web. The bots are trained on huge amounts of information scraped from the internet, which they can draw on to answer questions. But the technology also constantly makes up information, making the tools unreliable in terms of accuracy.