Asia Tech Wire (July 26) -- OpenAI launched a new search function called "SearchGPT" on Thursday, posing its most direct challenge yet to Google, which has long dominated the search industry.

Shares of Google's parent company Alphabet fell 3% on the day after the ChatGPT owner made the announcement.

OpenAI said it has opened registration for the new tool, which is currently in prototype stage and undergoing testing with a small group of users and publishers.

The new feature will be available in a beta version on a web browser.

The company plans to integrate the search tool's functionality into ChatGPT in the future.

OpenAI said in a blog post that SearchGPT will provide aggregated search results with links to sources in response to user queries. When using the tool, users will also be able to ask follow-up questions and receive contextual responses.