"That’s because, under the radar, a new wave of startups have been playing with many of the same chatbot-enhanced search tools for months."

"A raft of other companies, such as Perplexity, Andi, and Metaphor, are also combining chatbot apps with upgrades like image search, social features that let you save or continue search threads started by others, and the ability to search for information just seconds old."

"Google has been exploring the idea of using large language models (the tech behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard) for some time. But when ChatGPT became a mainstream hit, Google and Microsoft made their moves."

"Today, off-the-shelf software has made it easier than ever to build a search engine and plug it into a large language model."

"That’s been Socher’s experience. Socher left his role as chief AI scientist at Salesforce to cofound You.com in 2020."

"Last week it introduced multimodal search—where its chatbot can choose to respond to queries using images or embedded widgets from affiliated apps rather than text—and a feature that lets people share their exchanges with the chatbot, so that others can pick up an existing thread and dive deeper into a query."

"Perplexity—a company set up by former researchers from OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, a website where people ask and answer each other’s questions—is taking search in a different direction."

"Andi’s spin on search involves using large language models to pick the best results to summarize."

"Companies building chatbots for search try to get around this problem by plugging large language models into existing search engines and getting them to summarize relevant results rather than inventing sentences from scratch."

"Either way, this new era of search probably won’t ditch lists of links entirely. “When I think about search five years from now, we’ll still have the ability to look through results,” says Hoover. “I think that’s an important part of the web.”"

"“What’s noteworthy isn’t that large language models generate false information, but how good they are at turning off people’s critical reasoning abilities,”"

"Billed as “a search engine with training wheels,” Search Coach helps people, especially students and educators, learn how to write effective search queries and identify reliable resources."

"“You don't want to fight against convenience, that's a losing battle in consumer tech,”"

"“But there’s some pretty fundamental questions about the entire state of the internet at play here.”"