Personalised Results for Natural Queries

Users can now search for products by simply typing a question in everyday language—such as “What’s a good hair dryer under ₹5,000?”—and receive curated recommendations. Results will include product visuals, ratings, and links to relevant retailers’ websites. Initially, the update focuses on categories like fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics.

This enhancement is available to users of GPT-4o, the default model for ChatGPT, across all account types—Free, Plus, and Pro. Even logged-out users can try the new features, as OpenAI begins a global rollout. Users on Android phones, iPhones and web can now try out the new feature.

A Bid to Challenge Google’s Dominance

The move underscores OpenAI’s ambition to rival Google in the information and product search space. While Google’s Search product remains dominant, it has increasingly faced criticism for prioritising paid advertising slots, which can detract from organic search quality.

OpenAI says ChatGPT handled over a billion web searches last week, indicating significant growth in user engagement. However, the company is currently avoiding monetisation through advertising. Shopping results are generated from third-party metadata such as pricing, product descriptions, and user reviews—and OpenAI insists it does not receive affiliate commissions or prioritise paid listings.

Memory Integration Coming Soon

A future update will integrate ChatGPT’s memory feature with shopping, allowing the chatbot to remember previous conversations and offer more tailored recommendations. This functionality, however, will not be available in the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, or Liechtenstein due to data privacy regulations.

In another upgrade mimicking traditional search engines, ChatGPT will now display trending search suggestions as users begin typing—similar to Google’s autocomplete.

WhatsApp and Beyond

ChatGPT search has also been integrated into WhatsApp, enabling users to receive product suggestions and web search responses directly within the messaging app.

This shopping enhancement builds on previous experiments by OpenAI, including its “Operator” agent platform, which browsed the web in real-time to suggest products. The new ChatGPT search, by contrast, offers a faster, more interactive experience aimed at making AI-assisted online shopping mainstream.

 Despite covering less than 1% of the world’s ocean area, the Bay of Bengal provides nearly 8% of global fishery production. 
| Photo Credit: L. Balachandar

Strong and weak monsoons can influence marine productivity in the Bay of Bengal, a study exploring fluctuations in the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) over the past 22,000 years has found. Marine productivity is a proxy for plankton growth – the main source of nourishment for aquatic life. The study is significant given that several climate models warn of significant disruption to the monsoon, under the impact of human-caused warming.

The study, which appears in the peer-reviewed, Nature Geoscience, brought together scientists from India, China, Europe and the United States.

“By analysing their chemistry and tracking the abundance of certain types that thrive in productive waters, we reconstructed long-term changes in rainfall, ocean temperatures and marine life in the Bay of Bengal,” said Kaustubh Thirumalai, of the University of Austin and lead author of the study. “Together, these chemical signals helped us understand how the monsoon and ocean conditions responded to global climate changes over the past 22,000 years.”

Despite covering less than 1% of the world’s ocean area, the Bay of Bengal provides nearly 8% of global fishery production. Its nutrient-rich coastal waters are vital to the densely populated communities along its shores, many of whom rely heavily on fisheries for food and income.

“Millions of people living along the Bay of Bengal rely on the sea for protein, particularly from fisheries,” said Yair Rosenthal, of the Rutgers University and a co-author. “The productivity of these waters – the ability of the ocean to support plankton growth – is the foundation of the marine food web. If ocean productivity declines, it will powerfully affect the ecosystem, ultimately reducing fish stocks and threatening food security for coastal communities.”

The study found that both abnormally strong and weak monsoons throughout history caused major disruptions in ocean mixing, leading to a 50% reduction in food for marine life in the surface waters. This occurs because extreme monsoon conditions interfere with the vertical movement of nutrient-rich waters from the deep ocean to the surface, where plankton—the base of the food chain—flourish.

To reconstruct past ocean conditions, scientists analysed fossilised shells of foraminifera, tiny single-celled marine organisms that record environmental data in their calcium carbonate shells. These microfossils were retrieved from seafloor sediments by scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution, a research ship operating under the International Ocean Discovery Program.

The researchers found that marine productivity declined sharply during periods like Heinrich Stadial 1 (a cold phase between 17,500 and 15,500 years ago) and the early Holocene (about 10,500 to 9,500 years ago), when monsoons were either unusually weak or strong. Monsoon rainfall directly affects river run-off into the Bay of Bengal, altering ocean salinity and circulation. When too much freshwater builds up at the surface, it prevents nutrient mixing. Conversely, weak monsoons reduce wind-driven mixing, also starving surface waters of nutrients.

“Both extremes threaten marine resource availability,” Mr. Thirumalai said.

By comparing ancient patterns with modern ocean data and climate model projections, researchers identified “worrying” similarities, the authors said in a statement. Future scenarios suggest warmer surface waters and stronger freshwater run-off—conditions linked to past drops in marine productivity. Additionally, weaker future winds may fail to break through ocean stratification and restore nutrient cycling.

After a prolonged wait, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has finally set the ball rolling for the final preparatory stages of one of its most highly anticipated global collaborations. The collaborative mission with the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, is scheduled to take off in June 2025. The ambitious Earth observation satellite will boast one of the largest and most advanced radar imaging systems ever to have been launched into space. When in operation, NISAR will offer a new window of the Earth’s surface, with critical information about Earth’s changing systems, natural hazards, and environmental change.

NASA and ISRO coordinates to finalise NISAR mission in June

As the satellite approaches completion, NASA and ISRO are coordinating to finalize the mission launch date. The launch vehicle that is the backbone of this mission, GSLV-F16, will lift off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. One of the most significant milestones during this preparation phase is the movement of the second stage of GSLV rocket from the ISRO Propulsion Complex to the launch pad. This means that the vehicle and satellite integration is near, and the mission is now well on its way towards its final implementation phase.
The SAC based in Ahmedabad, which is one of the premier organisations of ISRO working on building the S-band radar for use by NISAR, has taken a serious effort at inducting the private sector. SAC recently organized a workshop in which it invited start-ups and new-entry firms to look for commercial spin-offs out of the mission. The workshop was focused on pushing the technological advances in Earth observation technologies by leveraging the high-technology radar capability of NISAR. With this initiative, ISRO is not just bringing its scientific knowledge but also catalyzing industry collaboration in order to release maximum applications in the real world from space-borne data across agriculture and forest, urbanization, and climate sensing.

NISAR’s radar technology integrates ISRO and NASA expertise

NISAR has been under development for almost a decade, one of India and the US’s most visible cooperative space science missions. Despite the global setbacks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists in the two nations stayed on course. The mission revolves around a cutting-edge dual-frequency radar system. The L-band radar was designed by NASA with a longer wavelength, which works extremely well to penetrate vegetation, ice, and even dirt. It is therefore extremely helpful in monitoring forests, agricultural fields, and polar regions. ISRO built the S-band radar, however, which has higher resolution to monitor surface-level changes with more details.
The two radar systems were phased in. ISRO’s S-band radar was transported to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in March 2021, where it was combined with the L-band system. By March 2023, the combined radar payload was shipped to the UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, where the testing was finally done and the radar was integrated with the satellite platform.

NISAR to offer global Earth monitoring every 12 days

NISAR will monitor nearly the entire land and ice surface of the Earth every twelve days. The satellite will capture high-resolution images that will transform our knowledge of a broad variety of environmental and geological processes. These include tracking glaciers and polar ice caps, which are key indicators of climate change. The satellite will also monitor displacements in the Earth’s crust and thus be an important tool to observe and study earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions.
Apart from this, NISAR will also have a significant role in mapping vegetation cover, forest biomass, agricultural crop stages, soil moisture, and water bodies. The mission is going to be highly beneficial for nations that are threatened by climate change and natural disasters since the data is going to be made available. This open access policy can facilitate better decision-making in disaster response, environmental management, urban planning, and resources management.
Originally scheduled to lift off in the early part of 2024, the mission was delayed due to the necessity for corrective actions on one of its modules stationed in the U.S. Overcoming those teething troubles, the satellite is now scheduled for a mid-2025 lift-off, and into an all-important phase of operational readiness.

ISRO prepares for multiple high-profile missions in the coming months

While NISAR is certainly a front-page mission, ISRO has a hectic schedule for the remainder of the year with other high-profile activities. Possibly most prominent of these is the launch of the PSLV-C61 carrying the Earth Observation Satellite EOS-09. The satellite, with a C-band synthetic aperture radar onboard, will provide high-resolution imagery of Earth’s surface. Like NISAR, EOS-09 will be operational in all weather and at night, and hence will be a powerful instrument for civil as well as scientific applications.
The second test flight of the Gaganyaan programme is another significant mission on ISRO’s list. The mission, known as TV-D02, will flight-test the crew escape system in a simulated abort mission. This mission is for protecting the lives of future astronauts and involves a sea-based recovery mission for the crew module. The Gaganyaan project, which will take Indian astronauts to outer space, has recently cleared with a new budget of ₹20,193 crore, reiterating the seriousness of the government to position India as a serious human spaceflight player.

India’s lunar ambitions soar with Chandrayaan-4 and future space station plans

India’s ambitions reach far beyond Earth orbit. The recently approved Chandrayaan-4 mission has been greenlit with a budget of ₹2,104 crore and will bring back samples from the Moon’s southern high latitudes by October 2027. It will be a landmark for ISRO, with India’s maiden lunar sample-return mission and an upgrade to its status in the global scientific fraternity.
Down the line, ISRO has two ambitious goals for the coming decades. The first is to build a full-fledged Indian space station, the Bhartiya Antariksh Station, by 2035. The second is even more ambitious: landing an Indian astronaut on the Moon safely by 2040. These long-term goals show India’s resolve to become one of the leading space powers of the world, with autonomous scientific exploration and distant space capabilities.
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