[Image: Anthropic] Anthropic announced Thursday that it has added web search capability to its Claude chatbot. It’s not a new feature to the AI world—but the company’s approach stands as one of the most thoughtful to date.
Much like Perplexity , Anthropic’s Claude works relevant information from the web into a conversational answer, and includes clickable source citations.
Web search is available as a “feature preview” for U.S. users of the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, with plans to expand to the free tier and to more countries.
What sets Anthropic’s web search feature apart is that it is automatic. Rather than requiring users to manually select a web search on a given query (as with OpenAI’s ChatGPT), Claude decides on its own whether fetching web data would improve an answer.
“Our north star is that you should ask Claude a question and it should be able to do whatever you want it to do, finding the information that’s necessary across whatever sources it has access to,” says Scott White, who leads development of the web version of Claude (Claud.ai). “The way that we’ve designed web search is that when you turn it on, it’s always on, and Claude will decide when it thinks it makes sense to do it.”
After it receives a time-sensitive question, Claude may generate an initial answer from its training data and then state: “. . . but let me search for more precise information since this could have changed.”
That matters since, without web search enabled, the results are subject to a cutoff date in the large language model’s training data. Claude’s training data only goes up to October 2024, while ChatGPT’s (using GPT-4o) goes up to June 2024. That’s why ChatGPT (without web search turned on) returns outdated information when asked, for example, to identify which major AI chatbots have web search: It mentions Google Bard, for example—even though that product has since been renamed Gemini. With the web search button clicked on, all these errors disappear.
Anthropic is adding web search to its Claude chatbot in a very smart way
