ChatGPT conversations can accumulate quickly if you regularly converse with the AI chatbot. Finding a particular bit of discussion with ChatGPT has been difficult, though, even with well-labeled thread names. OpenAI has released a new search feature for ChatGPT to address that issue. The feature lets you sift through past conversations by looking for specific terms, making it much easier to find bits you don’t totally remember or pull up old threads without having to dive deep into the list of threads.
The search tool is only available to those subscribing to ChatGPT Plus or Teams for now, though free users are supposed to be able to use it starting next month. To use the search tool, you just need to click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the ChatGPT sidebar. Write in the word or phrase you want to find, and the AI chatbot will sort through your history to locate specific messages. If you have particularly long chat threads, that could save you a lot of time.
We’re starting to roll out the ability to search through your chat history on ChatGPT web.Now you can quickly & easily bring up a chat to reference, or pick up a chat where you left off. pic.twitter.com/YVAOUpFvzJOctober 29, 2024
ChatGPT search, not SearchGPT
Hearing the term search with the term ChatGPT immediately brings to mind SearchGPT, the rather imperfect web search feature teased by OpenAI this summer. The new tool is more like how you might hunt through a folder of documents or perhaps an email inbox.
And while OpenAI didn’t explicitly call it out, it would be logical for the search tool to learn from your interactions the way it does from your conversations. That might mean getting better at knowing the kind of conversation history you are likely to search for and maybe filtering the results.
The search feature isn’t exactly earth-shattering, but it does at least bring ChatGPT to parity with some of its rivals like Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. It fits with some of the other quality-of-life improvements to ChatGPT, including a better chat interface, autocomplete suggestions, and using “/” to immediately command ChatGPT to search online or generate images.
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