Tired of Traditional Web Search? These Are the Best AI Search Engines We’ve Tested

PC Mag: “Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot (among others) have successfully made AI chatbots mainstream and serve as viable alternatives to standard web search engines. In turn, the standard search engines from those companies (along with alternative ones) have adopted some AI elements. Bing, for example, now offers the Copilot Search feature that shows you the AI’s reasoning process. Meanwhile, Google’s AI Overviews provide a summary of findings at the top of a results page. The company is also working to expand AI Overviews into a dedicated search interface called AI Mode, which you can query directly like a chatbot. AI can greatly improve the web search experience, and Copilot is a productivity booster in terms of research. Whereas you used to have to pore over multiple web pages in standard search results, you can now often find the kernel of knowledge you’re after with just one text prompt. Plus, if an initial answer isn’t quite what you’re looking for, AI search bots keep track of your previous requests to give follow-up questions context. That means you don’t have to keep rephrasing your query the way you do with standard search or legacy AI tools like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. But Copilot in Bing and Google AI Overviews aren’t our focus here. Instead, we are looking at search engines that run entirely on generative AI. Generative AI and chatbots typically rely on large language models (LLMs) that train on an information set with a specific cutoff date. The search engines we highlight here also use LLMs to understand the text you enter, but rather than basing their results on a fixed knowledge base, they scan the live web for up-to-date information and use AI to generate the best answer. The better ones even show you their sources so you can double-check them…”