OpenAI has chosen to celebrate Halloween in a very unusual way. The company surprised everyone by giving ChatGPT users access its online search tool SearchGPT. This is a great tip or gift that I certainly didn’t expect to receive in my inbox on Thursday afternoon.

But you know what’s even more exciting than using ChatGPT do a search on the web? The ability to search your ChatGPT chat history to retrieve old conversations. That’s right, the feature is available immediately in ChatGPT and should significantly improve your experience with the chatbot.

I signed up for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search (SearchGPT) test a long time ago, but I didn’t expect to have access to it so soon. Indeed, new AI features take even longer to arrive in Europe, where I live.

But OpenAI actually launched SearchGPT in all regions, apparently. All I had to do to see if the feature was enabled in Europe was to refresh the ChatGPT webpage. Sure enough, the new search icon appeared in the ChatGPT prompt field, as shown below.

The feature will also be available in OpenAI’s desktop and mobile apps, which is exactly what you’d expect from this feature.

But something else caught my eye in the updated ChatGPT UI. There is now a new magnifying glass in the upper left corner, which I initially mistook for SearchGPT. It’s the icon you associate with online searches, so I figured that’s where OpenAI put it.

I didn’t know the magnifying glass meant anything else. This is the “search for chats” feature that 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 simply scroll through your history. If you remember the title of a particular search, you could use the browser’s search tool to look it up, but even that involved some scrolling.

I’m sure I’m not the only ChatGPT user experiencing this problem. I often want to see the chats again and continue chatting with the chatbot on certain topics. That’s the whole point of having ChatGPT chat history available on desktop and mobile. I’m also pretty sure I started duplicate conversations with the chatbot on certain topics rather than searching for the original one.

Since using ChatGPT for marathon training advice, I’ve had several marathon-related chats with the AI. Thanks to the new “cat search” 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 chat itself for specific keywords. I only used “marathon” in this example, but I could refine my search further to find what I need.

OpenAI has a supporting document which offers more details on the new “cat search” feature. The company says the feature will let you search for content in archived chats, but it will no longer recover older chats if you delete them from history.

The simultaneous deployment of ChatGPT Search and the “chat search” feature cannot be a coincidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI uses similar technology to search ChatGPT chat history and the web.

Regardless, I’m happy to see the “chat search” feature going live in ChatGPT. As for the ChatGPT online search functionality, that’s a topic for another day. I haven’t even started to seriously test it.