Arc Search has been all the rage over the past 24 hours, a new desktop and mobile web app that aims to replace Chrome and Safari on your device has been getting tonnes of praise, but what exactly is it?
Put simply, it’s an AI-powered web browser, but not in the same way that, for example, ChatGPT or Windows CoPilot access the internet to provide you with answers. It’s an exceptionally clean-looking app, without a lot of distractions across the sides.
This appears to be the focus of The Browser Company, the group behind the app. Their MacOS version, which launched long before this app, is focused on being easy to read and less cluttered than current browsers.
I’ve just had a small try of the new phone browser, and it has so far been a very intuitive experience (I don’t have an iPhone, and at the moment, it’s exclusive to iOS).
While you can absolutely use this as a standard browser, with Google nominally set as the default search engine, Arc Search’s primary mode of use is the ‘Browse For Me’ button which couples to search queries.
When you tap this button, the app will take some time to generate information on a page. It’ll show you the websites from where it is sourcing information, and then it’ll generate an easy-to-scroll snapshot of the query you’ve searched.
Here’s a test query we tried this morning – this is what you get when you search ‘Apple Vision Pro Australia’. I wanted to see what would happen when I tested it against a topic where there has been some development in the past 24 hours, and this topic that I covered this morning (Kogan offering imported models) seemed perfect.
I’m of two minds. While I’m very impressed with what has been generated here, including very readable information on grey imports, the lack of Australian availability and pricing, and readily available sources of information (which you can click through to read the entire article, with heaps of adjacent sources listed at the bottom), I’m not too thrilled with the fact that this information has been generated from my work. One might reason this as an AI equivalent of Google generating snippets at the top of Search when you search for a topic (for example, actors from a movie, or the results of a football game). If you see it like this, it’s a little different to a content aggregator like Feedly, though it can generate sentences on the fly.
The Verge covered it best in their write-up of the app: “Will the company work with the publishers whose information it’s using to populate these answers? How will Arc’s AI cite its sources? How personalised should these things be? How personalised can they be? A search like this is bound to be expensive; will Arc Search be a paid product over time?”
These unknowns underlie so much of the AI conversation, and as someone who can, at least in some small part, say that their article was essential to the generation of the above AI-generated results, I’d love to know the answers, and eagerly await answers from pretty much any company in the AI space.
Here’s another test; ‘e-scooter safety Australia’.
This is a great example of a topic where you need to click through to the full article to know the whole story. Specific restrictions and rules aren’t outlined in the AI summary, although a fairly decent snapshot of the trending topic is provided.
The app also begs upon being opened for the first time to be made your default browser. Right from the Microsoft Edge playbook.
Anyway. Arc Search is available now on iOS devices, although an Android release date has not been specified (a Windows version of the MacOS app is still in development, too). It’s definitely a lot better looking than Safari or Chrome, and it’s fast, but I just can’t get past my AI concerns with it.
Image: Zachariah Kelly/Gizmodo Australia