TLDR Tech / Marketing
ChatGPT is NOT a search engine
ChatGPT Search acts as an orchestrator that runs many parallel searches and merges them into one synthesized answer instead of returning a list of links from a single query. A Sonic classifier decides if a query needs fresh web data, and it triggers search when probability passes a threshold, with decisions made in about 196 ms. The system expands one prompt into multiple fan out queries across web, shopping, images, news, and local sources, then combines results using Reciprocal Rank Fusion and recency filters like 7 days, 30 days, or 365 days. The infrastructure relies heavily on third party providers and scraped sources.
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