Answer: How to find the best AI-powered search engine of the moment?

How can you find the best tool... 

P/C Dall-E. Prompt "clash of the titans - three giant science fiction robots all fighting together with thunder lightning dramatic skies

 

... to do that search thing we all know and love?  Is there a kind of meta-search tool for search-engines?   

As you well know, there are LOTS of options for doing SearchResearch operations.  So this week had a different kind of Challenge--a kind of meta-search Challenge--a search for the best research tools out there. 

1. How can I find the best AI-powered search tools out there? Is there a way to do this? 

2. What's your favorite AI-powered search engine?  Say why it's your favorite?  

Naturally, I did multiple approaches to this.  Obvious search #1 on both Google and Bing: 

     [ best search engines ] 

This gave multiple lists of search engines, most of which won't surprise you.  Bing, Google, Yandex, Baidu,  Naver (Korean). 

There are a lot of others as well that are less well-known, but rely on conventional search engines to create their index and/or provide their results:   these are search engines like DuckDuckGo (Bing), SwissCows (Bing),  StartPage (Google),  Gibiru (Google).  Their advantage is that they offer privacy protection for your searches.  

And there are speciality topic search engines: Wolfram Alpha (science, math, technology), TinEye (image search), SlideShare (for presentation slide decks) etc.  

As we've noted before, there's a nice Wikipedia page with a List of Search Engines. As with most Wikipedia pages, it's fairly up-to-date, so that's a good resource to check every so often.  Put that on your list of things-to-check once a month or so.  

Are these "AI-powered"?  If we would have asked that question 12 months ago, the answer would have been NO, but of course, this is the Year of AI, so now the answer is YES, of course. 

If we're more specific, say "AI chatbot interfaces to search engines," then the list gets smaller.  Google and Bing have such frontends, but so do You.com and a few others.  

Thing is, many of the general purpose chatbots also act as a general purpose question-answering tool.  In a sense, they're ALL chat front-ends. You can ask any of them to (prompt) "give me a list of the top ten search engines with chatbot interfaces."  That's effectively asking any chatbot to act like a classic search engine.   

As you know, questions like "how can I find the best X" (for any kind of X) involves testing, evaluation, or some kind of basis for recommendation.  The key question is how do you evaluate a chatbot search engine?  

If we ignore measuring things like quality of the conversation, but just stick to how accurately the chatty search engine answers the questions, it's a different ball game.  

Microsoft and Google are reviewing and rating their new gizmos and looking at what the raters are saying, but it's an incredibly tough problem--they're trying to evaluate their ability to answer literally any question.  (It doesn't help that Google's own internal raters are complaining that they're not being given enough time to actually do the research needed to give an accurate rating.  See: Business Insider article, April 4, 2023.) 

So I searched for: 

     [ compare accuracy of chatgpt and bard answers ]  

I'm only asking about ChatGPT and Bard based systems.  (There are other LLMs out there, but I don't expect to find comparisons just yet.  Maybe in a year or so.)  

Since everything is changing so quickly, I then limited the search to just results within the past month.  You can do this with a tool (click on Tools then Last month) or you can modify the query like this: 

     [ compare accuracy of chatgpt and bard answers after:2023-05-20 ]

This query leads to a bunch of fascinating results.  You can look at each of the articles in detail--here's the list of the top five articles I found with short summaries:  

Lifewire:  Bard is the clear winner, but ChatGPT is better on productivity. 

Zapier: Bard is better generally, but ChatGPT is a better writer.  

ExpressVPN: Tie

Duplichecker: Very close, slight edge to ChatGPT for ability to use more writing styles. 

TechRepublic: Bard is free and the training data is up-to-date (not true of ChatGPT).  

Bottom Line:  With this quick survey, as of this moment, it looks like Bard is edging out ChatGPT... but this might change at any moment.  And, for coding and productivity applications, ChatGPT is the winner there.  But again... change is constant.  

So.. what's my favorite chatty search engine?  Answer:  Neither--or both.  I never do anything without running the prompt on each. I like some aspects of one (the writing style or the ability to reframe a long prompt) versus the other depending on the task.  I have to agree with the authors of these articles.  When I've tried coding tasks, ChatGPT usually does a better job. (And yes, I almost always run my tasks / queries on another chatty search engine like You.com, Perplexity or Scite.ai 

But given how quickly everything is changing, I have no doubt that these results will change with time.  Stay tuned.

It seems like every week there's yet another LLM chatbot put out into the public domain. So we have a job to do: keep tracking what's going on in the field and let us (the community) know what you're finding.  Please feel free to add a comment to this post if you find something new and fantastic--it's an easy way to share the knowledge.  

When you're looking for the latest update on LLMs and search, remember to use the before: and after: operators.  That way you can search month by month for the latest updates.  (You'll find, for instance, that Neeva, which is cited in many of the articles as a new, hot, exciting search engine, actually shut down on June 2, 2023.)  

SearchResearch Lesson

It's pretty obvious this week: 

1. You have to keep your eyes and ears open for the latest and greatest.  There's not going to be a clear winner anytime soon.  Check back here with SRS--I'll do my best to keep you in the loop about which chatty search engine is (currently) the best. 

Keep searching!  (And keep sharing your knowledge...)