And swish down the toilet it will go

I used it today and it had trouble finding an upcoming concert. It took some additional prompting, but it did eventually find the tour date (which was admittedly announced today).

 

Can’t wait to see this get better and refined.

I am assuming it is using Google’s search index where Chat GPT uses Bing’s. That’s just a hunch since Google is a top investor.

I spent a little time testing with it. It’s not terrible, but I hope it will improve.

 

One interesting note: You can see the searches it conducts because it gives you the query terms above the citations/link previews.

How detailed are the queries?

That’s the lackluster part IMO. Looks like an average of 7 keywords strung together. I see a few “x” used sparingly. I haven’t tried it with extended thinking yet. Had limited time this afternoon.

I wonder if the underlying search tech is a major limitation in more detailed searches. I know I've tried 12-15 on google, similar to a ChatGPT prompt but more query like, and it bombs hard.

Maybe it just needs "chain of search"

And operators/settings.

Continuing testing - because it’s more interesting than what I am supposed to be doing. ????

 

It does a much better job at asking it to go to specific sites or compare specific sites than simple discovery. The suggestions it gives after visiting and comparing specific sites are really good. Definitely some thinking applied vs just regurgitating.

@mika I use really long tail searches on google regularly and get better results than short queries. But I don’t just string them together, I use natural language. What I am seeing Claude use is a list of keywords not natural language.

I've not had much luck either keyword or natural language on google. Could be the topics. Results are often not matching desired outcome.

Okay, I can’t stop testing. I knew Claude could do way better. I asked it to redo the searches but use natural language to search vs a string of keywords. It is SO much better. I reported to Anthropic hopefully they will default Claude to natural language search. Until then I highly recommend that you prompt it to do so. However, if you are curious, you can not do that first to see what keywords Claude chooses and then have Claude re-search using natural language. The search term is exposed like a thinking token either way.

@barry you might be interested in this ????

i am aware, thank you for the heads up

The difference in prompting to use natural language was night and day for me.

It's apparently Brave search btw - <https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/21/anthropic-use-brave/>

@softplus Thank you. Explains a lot about the results. But surprised it wasn’t Google since ya know - a few billion dollars…;) I don’t know a ton about Brave search. It falls back to Google for some things right? Guessing it does for local search terms often?