Comparison of Claude AI’s New Web Search With Gemini and ChatGPT
AI bots want to help you with your web searches and everything else, and Claude is the latest AI assistant that gives you the power to search for information online – be it the latest news headlines or the latest gadget prices.
“With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, making tasks that require up-to-the-minute data more accurate,” says developer Anthropic . This feature is already available on all paid plans and is “coming soon” to free users.
Web search is another challenge for AI models, testing their ability to sift through and evaluate content published online rather than embedded in its training data. Here’s how Claude fares – and compare it to Google Gemini and ChatGPT.
Using web search in Claude
To give Claude access to the Internet, click the slider button in the tooltip window and turn on the web search toggle switch. The AI bot will then access the Internet at large whenever it deems it appropriate for your query, but if you want it to use online information as part of its response, include something like “search the Internet” in your invitation.
When you run a web search, Claude will notify you of this in a response and will usually take a little longer to return with an answer. When the answer appears, little quote buttons appear at the end of some sentences so you know where the information came from. Click on any quote to be taken to that website in a new tab.
You can perform almost any query you enter into Google, covering everything from weather forecasts and sports scores to deep dives into music history and help with computer problems. As usual, you can then ask further questions about the results Claude gave you.
It’s easy to see the potential for AI to revolutionize the way we search the web, as it offers a more natural and granular experience than Google’s standard list of links. However, it is not without its challenges – not least whether these AI bots can be trusted and where they will get their information from if real people no longer have an incentive to post information online .
Get the news of the day
I assigned Claude to bring me the tech news headlines of the day, and he actually did two Internet searches to make sure he got everything. I read technology news every day, and Claude did a good job here: the articles were mostly new and mostly relevant, although the citation links tended to point to the front pages of news sites rather than to individual articles.
Gemini was roughly on par with Claude, although it managed to link to specific articles rather than just news outlets. Almost all of the results were from the last few days, are from a reputable source and are relatively significant in the world of tech news, although there were a few misses – like the new Samsung phone in India, which I’m not particularly excited about.
As for ChatGPT, the OpenAI bot was probably the worst of the bunch when it came to returning results that I cared about from sites that are the most respected in the tech news space (though you could argue that this is a subjective review). Everything still worked fine, but I preferred the results I got from Claude and Gemini.
When asked to return the latest news from Lifehacker, Claude was unable to do so and ChatGPT simply listed the headlines from the current home page without links. Gemini actually provided me with the latest stories with links, so it works best here, although probably the best option is to just open Lifehacker in your browser.
Fact checking online
Let’s move on to fact checking: I tested Claude by asking a question about a movie that I already knew the answer to. How many Oscars did One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest win? It got the answer right and the year right, and also made it clear that this is only the third film in history to win all five big Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (see if you can guess what the other two mean).
The Twins also received answers and context for the Big Five’s victory. His sources spanned a wider range of sites and even YouTube, while Claude stuck to Wikipedia and the official Oscar website. He gave a shorter, more concise answer than Claude and did not include background information on box office receipts.
As for ChatGPT, it once again managed to put together an accurate answer with useful context about the success of the Big Five and other films that managed to achieve such success. Like Claude, he mostly stuck to Wikipedia, but did something neither Claude nor the Gemini did: include YouTube videos of the Best Picture Oscar presentation.
These types of web searches are not particularly onerous. More complex questions can create more problems, especially if the answers are not available and the AI is tempted to make them up. I tried to trick these AI bots into thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis had won two Best Actor Oscars in recent years, but all three correctly determined that this never happened.
We go shopping with AI
Online shopping can be transformed by artificial intelligence. While real people will always be better than bots at making the right purchases, AI can quickly collect and summarize the opinions of real people and package them into a clear, user-friendly interface, while getting a cut of the sales. It’s like having a smart assistant without having to sift through a ton of information or search results.
I asked Claude to recommend an unusual gift related to sports or movies, and he dutifully searched for pages listing unusual gifts related to sports and movies. It did a great job of selecting some ideas, but I think this is a query that I could just run through Google without bothering the AI.
The twins gave a more personalized and chatty response. In this case, it didn’t provide any web links, perhaps because Google wants you to keep going to its main search engine for these kinds of queries: Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, Google already makes a lot of money by getting users to click on shopping links from shopping search results.
ChatGPT produced the most useful results here, perhaps thanks to the recent store update . The sources it listed were similar to those Claude used, but it contained several individual top picks, along with prices and links to purchase them online. Going forward, this could very well be one of the ways OpenAI gets some of its money back.
Web search is obviously still a work in progress for all of these AI tools. In some cases it works better than traditional Google search, but not always, and there is always the question of how much you can trust these confident and complete answers without checking the original sources they get their information from.
Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its artificial intelligence systems.