OpenAI is one such company that can give Google a run for their money. If you have been using ChatGPT, you’d know that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to the web and it cannot give you real-time data. Though Microsoft partnered with OpenAI for their own search engine Bing, I guess that wasn’t the thing that Sam Altman from OpenAI had in his mind. With their latest product, SearchGPT, they seek to bridge that gap and take leaps in threatening the monopoly of Google.

For my work, I do look for artifacts that I can use commercially. That is the case if I’m not looking for creating an artifact with an AI engine. And for that, I don’t go for Google but instead Openverse by WordPress. It is somewhat cumbersome to filter the creative commons artifacts for the search results in Google as you’re still unsure if you can use those items for your work. Whereas, in Openverse, you can filter them with ease. The whole user experience is different and better than Google.

But, with AI integration, search engines tend to turn beast. If you use Brave Search, you would understand how well an AI search can work and summarize what you’re looking for. It is indeed a better experience than Microsoft’s Bing even though they have collaborated with OpenAI. The advantage of Brave Search is that they use Leo and are good for people who have privacy concerns and do not want their search data to be sold in the online market. But, you can also change to your preferred AI engine such as Perplexity by navigating to Settings > Search engines and add Perplexity. DuckDuckGo browser (or rather DuckDuckGo Chat) on the other hand offers different AI engines to choose from.

SearchGPT could prove to be beneficial for people who love an AI engine to chat with or see some more refined results. It is too soon to say that OpenAI will or will not sell your data to advertisers or governments. It is currently available only to a handful of users. Their latest AI engine GPT 4o is already advanced enough to handle complex tasks but when they have access to the internet and real-time data from the major content publishers such as news, weather, and maps; imagine the extent to which they can damage Google’s search business. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) do have other profitable businesses and so they will still survive. But, the decline in the quality of Google search results is visible. They give a lot of emphasis to the sponsored results now. 
It is difficult to say if OpenAI would eventually rule the search business in future but will definitely give a hard time to Google especially considering the poor performance of Google’s AI engine, Gemini.