ChatGPT has just become a browser-based search engine with real-time links, maps, weather, sports, stocks and news.

Real-time search is an important next step for ChatGPT, which trained on data from a smaller period of time. There is a Chrome extension to make ChatGPT your default search engine.

The implications for travel are numerous. I asked ChatGPT.com, “Can you plan a trip for me along the Pacific Coast Highway in California?”

He responded with a 5-day itinerary from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, pulling information and links from sources like Californiacrossings.com, National Geographic, California.com, Travel + Leisure and many others.

“ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get quick and timely answers with links to relevant web sources, for which you previously would have had to go to a search engine. This combines the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes and more,” OpenAI’s announcement reads.

“ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon.”

The new tool is available Thursday on ChatGPT.com, desktop and mobile apps for ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users. Enterprise and Edu users should get the feature in the coming weeks, while free users will have to wait a few months, OpenAI said in a statement Thursday.

Introducing search engine functionality is a major challenge for Google – in the long term – even as Google develops its own product in Gemini. Google has introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of its traditional results page. There are no advertisements on ChatGPT.com yet.

Travel will be central to the development of OpenAI’s search engine. The company said: “We plan to continue to improve search, especially in areas such as shopping and travel, and leverage the reasoning capabilities of the OpenAI o1 series to perform deeper searches. »