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The Internet AI

'Arc Search' Combines Browser, Search Engine, and AI Into Something New and Different (theverge.com) 24

David Pierce reports via The Verge: A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, "What happened in the Chiefs game?" That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I'd Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the "Browse for me" button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web -- reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today -- and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a "notable event" that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game.

Basically, 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. [...] But from a pure product perspective, this feels closer to the way AI search should work than anything I've tried. Products like Copilot and Perplexity AI are cool, but they're fundamentally just chatbots with web access. Arc Search imagines something else entirely: AI that explores websites by building you a new one every time you ask.

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'Arc Search' Combines Browser, Search Engine, and AI Into Something New and Different

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  • Oh, no (Score:5, Insightful)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Monday January 29, 2024 @06:25PM (#64199092)

    Not this shit again.

  • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Monday January 29, 2024 @06:28PM (#64199102)
    ... just with some unnecessary "app" to be installed, which likely only exists to harvest even more data from the hosting device than what is entered into the search field?
  • Quite seriously, who wants that?

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      VC's? Or Silicon Valley bros looking for VC money? Who wants Arc?

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Quite seriously, who wants that?

      Typing in a question (or even a partial question) like this, and getting an answer -- is exactly how most people use the web. It's what the Google search page does for years now. I haven't tried Bing all year, but is this also not what MS does (only they are ahead of Google with the AI part)?

      The answer to "Who asked for this?" is: EVERYBODY and it's not new.

      The difference here is that it might be better at parsing your question and better at summarizing the results. MIGHT be. The main thing about these kind

      • ChatGTP may be ahead of Bard/Gemini, I'm not sure. I haven't seen evidence that Bing Chat is ahead of Google Search Generative Experience.
      • by kmoser ( 1469707 )

        It scoured the web -- reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today -- and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later.

        Results from Twitter? Indeed, nobody asked for that. I want even slightly more reputable sources, not random bleatings from anybody with a keyboard and an axe to grind.

  • Yeah the one you control and monetiseâ¦
  • My top priority when searching is reliable information, communicated well. Arc search's design permanently abandons any such notion. Troth sential, America's finest source for troth, all the same to a custom, bespoke web page builder. And if it's wrong? Who cares, it won't get generated again. Might as well call the app "Lie to you, or whatever".

    • My top priority when searching is reliable information, communicated well. Arc search's design permanently abandons any such notion. Troth sential, America's finest source for troth, all the same to a custom, bespoke web page builder. And if it's wrong? Who cares, it won't get generated again. Might as well call the app "Lie to you, or whatever".

      As useless as TFA and this "new app" may be, what does that have to do with Social Media, politics or factual accuracy?

  • Oh, you want your AI API to read an ad supported site and then summarize it for a user without the ads, can you say "blocked"? Well no you can't because the dictionary sites are also blocked.
    • Interesting.

      I remember when every NeXT cube came with a good dictionary.

      Having that data remote seems silly because it's tiny and mostly static.

      A quarterly sync with Wictionary would be plenty.

      An exception would be Urban Dictionary because it's constantly evolving. And they monetize with merch. And corporate AI is too puritanical to repeat a majority of entries there.

      I was hoping for innovation from the commercial dictionary sites but it never showed up. Princeton had useful Flash semantic network explorers

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday January 29, 2024 @07:10PM (#64199184)

    ... a platypus, I would have asked for a platypus.

  • Self-cannibalizing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Monday January 29, 2024 @08:39PM (#64199362)

    I see some of the same problems other AI systems have here. Where does it retrieve the data to make these insta-websites? From websites. So if everyone used it then there would be no motivation to make websites. Then there would be no source of data for the AI.

    This is the fundamental challenge I do not see the AI people address.

    • Duh, of course they won't address it. By the time this becomes a real problem, they want to be sitting on a beach somewhere. They couldn't care less that the bag... err... shareholders will be getting deep-sixed by the mess they created.

  • So it decides what is true. And it draws conclusions for you. No thanks. And the sites that it reads get paid by ads, but that business model will fail with this new approach. So we can then expect the continued decline of news research.
  • And it looks like a completely shitty app. It didn't even render correctly.

  • I used to do this with Ask Jeeves. I'm sure this will work just as well.

  • Lawsuits waiting to happy. While potential useful in ideal scenarios where its does return junk info, it is still taking other people’s work and repackaging it for their ad dollars instead of driving web traffic to those who generate the content. It is theft, plain and simple.
  • Hey great. This will take away all the inconvenience of me having to do my own research by wading through various results and making up my own mind whether they're relevant or just crap. Now I can be told exaclty what I'm supposed to view/thnk based on a list of important websites somebody else thinks are the best.

    That'll save my brain a lot of work and wasted time looking at informtion from "non approved" places.

    Hopefuly I'll also get to see a lot more relevant ads too.

    Maybe at some point they can make t

  • So, type in a search, no, it auto"corrects" what you type,and gets you sponsored ads faster than ever. And tells you that your search term's wrong.

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