It seems OpenAI, with bullish support from Microsoft, is ready to take on Google’s bread-and-butter business with a web search product. “The Search service would be partly powered by Bing,” the report claims. That part of the strategy is hardly surprising. Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into the company since its early days and has heavily relied on OpenAI’s tech stack to reimagine its own products, including Bing.
Microsoft launched its own version of ChatGPT under the name Bing Chat, then expanded the GPT-based generative AI capabilities to other products such as the Office portfolio, and eventually pushed it everywhere under the Copilot branding in 2024. It won’t be surprising to see the software giant giving a thrust to OpenAI’s AI-fueled web search product in a bid to breathe some life into Bing, as well. Microsoft lost the search engine war to Google a while ago, and AI could just be its golden opportunity to win some users into its ecosystem.
How exactly OpenAI’s secretive web search product will pan out remains to be seen, but there are some probable examples out there. Among them is Arc Search, an app developed by The Browser Company, that comes with a “Browse for me” feature. This trick scrapes the web for information relevant to the search query, compiles data from six authoritative sources, and then presents the results in the form of a custom web page, saving users the hassle of browsing a typical search page and clicking on links to find their answers.