Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/28/24053882/arc-search-browser-web-app-ios
QuoteBasically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company's big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren't different things. They're all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.
At least they are thinking outside of the box.
That sounds good ...on (e)paper. But for the general public. I don't think it will cut it for deep, forensic search.
>deep
It's like the old time multi-engine metasearch engines that polled maybe the first 3 serp pages from each source search engine, it's a broad search but hardly deep.
Since it's an app and I don't have an iPhone, I can't test it myself, but here is a test by one blogger:
https://werd.io/2024/stripping-the-web-of-its-humanity
He found a lot of the Arc search results to be either out of date or just wrong. If you were doing the search on a conventional search engine you would be able to see that some of the sources were old but Arc search strips that contextual clue away so you never see it.