Top AI Search Engine Features Compared

AI-powered search engines have profoundly impacted how we obtain information and are lessening our reliance on established providers such as Google and others. Even Meta is reportedly working on AI-powered search.

Here is a list of AI search engines to explore, offering new options for research, marketing, and even advertising. In addition to new disruptive AI startups, I’ve included recent AI enhancements and applications from established providers.

AI Search Engines

SearchGPT is a new feature within OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI says the search offers up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, weather info, and more, powered by real-time search and partnerships with data providers. ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what users ask, or they can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon. Search will be available at ChatGPT.com⁠ and its desktop and mobile apps. Access to free users will roll out over the coming months.

Google has included AI in its Search product to enhance its capabilities. Google also recently extended its real-time search for its Gemini AI platform, enabling its language models to access current information from Google Search. The Grounding with Google Search feature is available for Gemini API and AI Studio, enabling improved accuracy in the model’s responses. When it enriches results with data from Search, Google provides supporting links back to the underlying sources.

Additionally, Google recently launched AI Overviews, which summarizes search results into short paragraphs. Google Search is gradually making AI Overviews available to more users and regions, providing AI-generated snapshots on applicable searches with key information and links to dig deeper.

Microsoft Copilot, formerly called Bing Chat, is an AI-powered digital assistant that engages in conversations and helps people with a range of tasks, such as answering queries or creating images or text drafts. Users can choose their chat style, such as “More Creative” or “More Precise,” to generate their preferred style of help. Copilot also provides citations to ensure the information is reliable. It is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and is free to use but requires a Microsoft account.

You.com is an AI search tool and productivity platform for individuals and businesses. You.com says it’s the first company to connect an LLM to live web access for real-time responses with citations. The platform is built on ChatGPT, Claude, and other models for its LLM capabilities, enabling complex searches and accurate results by carefully controlling which models are prompted and how. It’s developing shared AI workspace tools where multiple users can add documents and then summarize or ask questions among a team. You.com aims to provide next-generation AI research with clickable citations that are deep-linked and in context.

Perplexity, backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, is an AI-powered conversational search engine. The standard version uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5. Users can create a user profile so the search engine can optimize for personalization. The focus option tailors searches, such as Web, Writing, and Academic. Users can upload documents to get summary information and detailed insights. Users can enhance their search experience with the copilot feature for conversational interaction and thorough results. The free version of Perplexity offers unlimited quick searches and limits the conversational Pro Searches to five per day. The Pro version provides 300 daily searches, access to advanced AI models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3, unlimited file analysis, API credit, and more.

Brave is a privacy-first search engine built into the Brave browser. Brave uses multiple self-hosted open-source LLMs and erases the search query information when a session has ended. In June, Brave integrated its search results with its AI chatbot, Leo, enabling users to research information without navigating the search page. A premium version of Leo is also available, offering access to better models and higher limit rates. When accessing the AI search feature, users can choose an external LLM from a partner such as Anthropic, and Brave automatically shields the users’ IP addresses and identifiable information. Brave now allows users to link their models to the browser.

Andi is an AI search tool that provides answers and content. Andi uses generative AI and large language models combined with live data, smart algorithms, and semantic search technology. Andi’s proprietary Trantora backend analyzes the meaning and credibility of web content, not just keywords. Andi provides accurate answers free from ads, spam, and misinformation. Recently, in the inaugural SearchBench AI benchmark, an independent evaluation of AI search accuracy, Andi received an accuracy score of 87% versus 71% for Google Gemini and 62% for OpenAI ChatGPT.

Komo is a free AI-powered search engine that creates personalized experiences for searchers with instant, reliable information, and no ads. It’s designed primarily to help individuals and businesses conduct in-depth research. Komo’s recent Search Everywhere feature enhances the journey by enabling users to dive deeper into any source of information. As they read through AI search responses, users can select text or click on the highlighted text, learn more, ask follow-up questions, get quick links to related websites, or explore opinions on the selected topic.

Arc Search from The Browser Company is an AI-powered mobile browser. Its “Browse for me” feature finds answers to a search query by generating a web page of information from at least six sources powered by models from OpenAI and others. Recently, Arc Search added an AI-powered “Call Arc” feature that lets users get quick answers on the go. Users access the feature by opening the app, holding the phone to an ear, and asking questions. The app provides instant voice responses; users can then ask follow-up questions.

Waldo AI is a search tool that delivers relevant and personalized results that consider user context, preferences, and previous interactions. Users can automatically generate scheduled or recurring research with insights, competitive intel, and trends, with full transparency on publication sources. Waldo integrates with paid-access sources and can pull sentiment data from the major social networks for up-to-date insights.

Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine with a mission to make scientific and evidence-based knowledge more accessible. Consensus uses language models and search technology to surface relevant research papers and then synthesizes topic-level and paper-level insights. Its current source material comes from Semantic Scholar, which includes over 200 million documents across all domains of science, updated monthly.

Phind is an AI search engine for developers, finding and generating coding solutions with references. The Playground mode is a vanilla chat interface for learning about its models. The Ask mode is a default experience for answering technical questions, automatically deciding when to search the internet for additional context.

DuckDuckGo is an independent browser and privacy-focused search engine that doesn’t track a user’s search history. DuckDuckGo recently launched a beta of DuckAssist, a generative AI-assisted feature to provide instant, sourced answer summaries in search results. Answers are intentionally short, with prominently cited sources to click through and learn more. Additionally, DuckDuckGo has released DuckDuckGo AI Chat, a free and anonymous way to access four popular generative AI chatbots. The company says its AI chat can access popular chatbots such as Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and two open-source models (Meta Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B), with more to come.