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:
Andi Search 87%
You.com 80%
Google Gemini 71%
OpenAI ChatGPT 62%
Perplexity 59%
There are three things that make Andi stand out:
Andi is a true AI search engine throughout the entire search results, not just at the top of the page the way Bing and Google AIO do.
Images, summaries, and options are offered in a way that makes sense contextually.
All on-page elements work together to communicate the information users are seeking.
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:
Web
Writing (text generation)
Academic (searches for academic papers)
Video
Math
Social (searches for discussions and opinions)
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.