The Best AI Search Engines To Try Right Now via @sejournal, @martinibuster

AI-powered search engines have made significant strides in the past year, not only comparing favorably to mainstream search engines like Google and Bing. Leveraging sophisticated open-source language models that rival commercial ones, today’s AI search engines offer high quality search experiences, innovative user interfaces, and robust privacy features many users will find attractive.

1. Brave AI Search

https://search.brave.com/

Brave is a privacy-first AI search engine that offers a clean and uncluttered user interface. Brave is a company that is committed to user privacy that also offers a privacy-first browser. Using the AI search engine is easy. Just go to the search engine and type the query. A drop-down navigation prompt will appear that allows a user to choose an AI search result that offers a useful and comprehensive summary of the answer.

Screenshot Of Brave AI Search Results

Brave AI Technology

Brave uses the open source Metas Llama 3 and Mistral AI Mixtral large language models (LLMs). The Brave Browser offers the ability to toggle Claude Instant from Anthropic. The open source LLMs are self-hosted. All user IP information is blocked from the LLM infrastructure and all search query information is immediately erased after a chat session is ended.

When using the Brave Browser built-in AI search feature, a user can select to use an external LLM from a partner like Anthropic, Brave automatically shields personally identifiable information like a user’s IP address from the third party and search query data is removed from external partner servers after 30 days. Brave currently offers Claude 3 models by Anthropic (both Haiku and Sonnet).

Brave AI search is perfect for users who value their privacy and want a top level AI search experience. Brave AI is easy to use, offers fantastic search results and offers the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you’re not going to be tracked.

2. Andi Search

https://andisearch.com

Andi Search is a privacy-first AI search engine that offers an ad-free search experience. A recent benchmark called Talc AI SearchBench ranked Andi Search over You.com, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

The rankings and correctness scores:

There are three things that make Andi stand out:

Andi Is More Than A Text-Based Search Engine

Humans are highly visual and Andi does a good job of presenting information with text and images, which makes it easy to comprehend answers.

Screenshot Of Andi Search Results

Andi Search And Privacy

Andi is a privacy-first AI company. It doesn’t store cookies, doesn’t share data, and no information is available to any employee of the company.

It even blocks Google’s FLoC tracking technology so that Google can’t follow you onto Andi.

What Is Andi AI Search?

Andi is a factually grounded AI search engine that was purposely created to offer trustworthy answers while avoiding hallucinations that are common to GPT-based apps. It uses large language models to understand the questions being asked then fetches the web sources with the correct answers. This way of answering questions is friendly to websites because it’s not trying to hold on to users but rather it shows where to find answers.

A search query of “how to style a pair of men’s blue corduroy pants” provides answers from the web (with images). A useful feature at the top of the page that enables users to toggle between web results, images and videos.

The business plan is to charge for premium versions in the future but at the current time it’s completely free to use.

Summary Of Andi Search

Andi is truly a rethink of how the search engines of today should function. It encourages users to rediscover the best that the web has to offer. The user interface is a bit cluttered and the search box is at the bottom of the page and not at the top where it’s expected, which causes a little confusion when first visiting the site. Although it’s clear in a testing phase, Andi search nonetheless offers a superior AI search experience with a high level of accuracy and usefulness.

3. Perplexity AI

https://www.perplexity.ai

Perplexity is a natural language conversational search engine that uses both traditional search with LLMs, is built on the Azure infrastructure and relies on GPT-3.

There is a free and a pro version. The free version offers no limits on quick searches and is limited to five “Pro Searches” per day. Free users can create a user profile so that the search engine can optimize for personalization.

The pro version (costing $20/month) offers 300 Pro Searches per day and a choice of different AI models including GPT-4o, Claude-3 and LLama 3.1, unlimited file analysis, access to Playground AI, Dall-E and other image creation AI models.

An interesting feature of Perplexity is the ability to set a focus for the type of search you’re doing.

Focuses offered are:

Summary

Perplexity offers a clean user interface that in many ways is better than Andi AI and while both respect user privacy, Perplexity is not self-described as a privacy-first search engine, stores user data as long as an account is active and will remove personal data 30 days after account deletion.

Nevertheless, Perplexity offers useful search results including a summary that many may find a lot more useful than using a standard search engine, even one that bolts an AI to the top of the search results like Google’s AI Overviews.

4. Phind

https://www.phind.com/search?home=true

Phind is a self-described “answer engine for developers” but it’s also useful as an AI search engine, offering an attractive user interface with search results that are likewise a pleasure to read. It accepts natural language search queries and provides lightning fast comprehensive answers in the form of a summary and links to web sources for the provided information. A drop-down menu allows paid Pro users to select more advanced LLMs like GPT 4o, Claude Sonnet & Opus.

The Phind search results themselves are useful and the websites it links to are authoritative and useful, offering the opportunity at the bottom of the page to ask a follow-up question. But it still hallucinates when I ask it the question: “What is a Google-friendly way to build links to a website?”

It cites a 2010 Google web page as supporting documentation for advice (like commenting on blogs) that doesn’t exist on the cited web page.

Overall, Phind is a useful AI search engine although it’s more heavily text-based than the other search engines on this list, which makes it more of a chore to scroll through large amounts of text.

5. YOU AI Search Engine

https://you.com

YOU is an AI search engine that combines a large language model with up-to-date citations to websites, which makes it more than just a search engine.

You.com calls itself YouChat, a search assistant that’s in the search engine.

Another outstanding feature is that YouChat can respond to the latest news and recent events.

YouChat can write code, summarize complex topics, generate images, write code, and create content (in any language).

You.com now offers four AI Modes which enable better responses to different kinds of search queries.

These are the new AI Modes

You is available at You.com,  as apps for Android and iPhone and also as a Chrome extension.

You.com SERPs With Links To Websites

You.com offers a summary in response to a search query and contains small links to the sources of information.

Screenshot Of You Search Result

You.com Supported By Ads

You.com distinguishes itself from the other AI search engines on this list by showing advertising.

Screenshot Of You.com Ads

YOU is available in a free and paid versions.

The free version of You offers a limited amount of searches, while the Pro and Team plans offers more searches and costs $15 and $25.

You.com Summary

Like Phind, You.com offers an AI search experience that’s heavily textual and lacks images.  Unlike the other search engines on this list, You.com shows advertising. The search results are useful but it also offers ads and other limitations, something the competition is free of.

AI Search Engine Future Is Now

AI Search is increasingly competitive, with startups like Andi Search offering remarkably useful and accurate search results. Open source LLMs play a larger role and create an opportunity for smaller search engines to compete head to head with bigger rivals like Google and Bing.

Give these search engines a try because they offer a search experience of tomorrow today.

More resources:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Inna Kot