Claude can now search the web

anthropic.com

1233 points by meetpateltech a month ago


tcdent - a month ago

Searching the web is a great feature in theory, but every implementation I've used so far looks at the top X hits and then interprets it to be the correct answer.

When you're talking to an LLM about popular topics or common errors, the top results are often just blogspam or unresolved forum posts, so the you never get an answer to your problem.

More of an indicator that web search is more unusable than ever, but interesting that it affects the performance of generative systems, nonetheless.

joshstrange - a month ago

Massive props to Anthropic for announcing a feature _and_ making it available for everyone right away.

OpenAI is so annoying in this aspect. They will regularly give timelines for rollout that not met or simply wrong.

Edit: "Everyone" = Everyone who pays. Sorry if this sounds mean but I don't care about what the free tier gets or when. As a paying user for both Anthropic and OpenAI I was just pointing out the rollout differences.

Edit2: My US-bias is showing, sorry I didn't even parse that in the message.

simonw - a month ago

The search index is provided by Brave: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/21/anthropic-use-brave/

- Brave is now listed as a subprocessor on the Anthropic Trust Center portal

- Search results for "interesting pelican facts" from Claude and Brave were an exact match

- If you ask Claude for the definition of its web_search tool one of the properties is called "BraveSearchParams"

herdcall - a month ago

It badly hallucinated in my test. I asked it "Rust crate to access Postgres with Arrow support" and it made up an arrow-postgres crate. It even gave sample Rust code using this fictional crate! Below is its response (code example omitted):

I can recommend a Rust crate for accessing PostgreSQL with Arrow support. The primary crate you'll want to use is arrow-postgres, which combines the PostgreSQL connectivity of the popular postgres crate with Apache Arrow data format support. This crate allows you to:

Query PostgreSQL databases using SQL Return results as Arrow record batches Use strongly-typed Arrow schemas Convert between PostgreSQL and Arrow data types efficiently

Cort3z - a month ago

I usually find Claude to be my favourite flavor of LLMs, but I still pay for ChatGPT because their voice offering is so great! I regularly use it as an "expert on the side" when I do other things, like doing bike repairs. I ask it things like "how do I find the min/max adjustments on my particular flavor of front derailleur", or when cooking, and my hands are dirty, I can ask stuff like "how much X do I usually need for Y people", and so on. The hands-off feature is so great when my hands are literally busy doing some other thing.

I really wish Claude had something similar.

NBJack - a month ago

I wonder if it will actually respect the robots.txt this time.

jsight - a month ago

I really want these to be able to find and even redisplay images. "Search all the hotels within 5 miles of this address and show me detailed pictures of the rooms and restrooms"

Hotels would much rather show you the outside, the lobby, and a conference room, so finding what the actual living space will look like is often surprisingly difficult.

CalChris - a month ago

I find myself Googling less often these days. Frustrated with both the poor search results and impressed with the quality of AI to do the same thing and more, I think search's days are numbered. AOL lasted as an email address for quite some time after America Online ceased to be a relevant portal. Maybe Gmail will as well.

msp26 - a month ago

> in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States. Support for users on our free plan and more countries is coming soon

US only

tantalor - a month ago

It says a lot about their product vision and intended market that the example query is typescript migration question.

Do they not care about typical search users? Only developers?

ubicomp - a month ago

Excited to see this. I've really been enjoying Claude. It feels like a different, more creative flavor of experience than GPT. I use Claude a lot for dialogues and exploring ideas, like a conversational partner. Having web access will add an interesting dimension to this.

agentultra - a month ago

They need to stop or else make their crawlers easy to identify and block. However I have no faith that AI companies will play by the rules.

They already cost people time, money, and their mental health by using adversarial tactics to evade blocking and ignoring robots.txt

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

pcj-github - a month ago

Does not really say /how/ it's performing a web search... Is it tapping into it's "own" corpus of material or calling out to some other web search engine?

ineedaj0b - a month ago

i stopped using Claude about 2 months ago. went to Grok (the code was better, everything was better - politics aside). i wonder if this update will improve it.

the main issue i find with Claude is, he fights you. He refuses so many requests and i need 3 or 4 replies to get what i want vs deepseek/grok. i've kept the monthly subscription to help anthropic, but it's trounced by the free options imo.

ggm - a month ago

So in many respects, search the place it used to construct the model? Isn't that functionally bias-reinforcing?

"Look what I synthesise is correct and true because when I use the same top 10 priming responses which informed my decision I find these INDEPENDENT RESULTS which confirm what I modelled" type reasoning.

None of us have a problem with an LLM which returns 2+2 = 4 and shows you 10 sites which confirm. What worries me is when the LLM returns 2+2 = 5 and shows 10 sites which confirm. The set of negative worth content sites is semi infinite and the set of useful confirmed fact (expensive) sites is small so this feels like an outcome which is highly predictable (please don't beat me up for my arithmetic)

e.g. "Yes Climate science is bunk" <returns 10 top sites from paid shills in the oil sector which have been SEO'd up the top>"

hombre_fatal - a month ago

Aside, does anyone know of an app like Perplexity for surfing the news in a foreign language (language practice)?

Perplexity's "Explore" tab translates its news to your local language, and its curated news items are all pretty interesting, but the problem is that there are so few of them. I seem to get maybe a dozen stories in a day. I paid their subscription for a month just to listen to the news on my walk, but didn't renew because of this.

A foreign news site like BBC Mundo (Spanish) on the other hand barely has any stories outside of a few niches. Its tech section only has a few stories per week.

Hmm, maybe I want a sort of RSS reader that AI-translates stories for me. But I don't really want to maintain a feed myself either.

Apple News would probably do it since they also have good curation, but afaict they still don't support foreign news sources (why???).

uzyn - a month ago

Surprised that Claude (the app, not model) not only has done well for so long, but has somewhat consistently clinched the top spot in coding, all without a feature that is considered somewhat of a basic feature for most consumer-facing AI apps.

jetrink - a month ago

> With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data.

I'm surprised that they only expect performance to improve for tasks involving recent information. I thought it was widely accepted that using an LLM to extract information from a document is much more reliable than asking it to recall information it was trained on. In particular, it is supposed to lead to fewer instances of inventing facts out of thin air. Is my understanding out of date?

fourside - a month ago

I’ll be interested in trying it. My admittedly limited experience with this on ChatGPT has been disappointing. ChatGPT falls for the SEO content that has taken over the web.

As an example, I recently travelled abroad to a popular vacationing spot and asked ChatGPT for local recommendations on what to do. When it gave me answers directly, they were pretty solid. But when it “searched the web” instead, the answers were awful. Every single result it suggested had terrible ratings. It did this repeatedly. One of those times I asked it to pick something with better ratings and it sort of improved but not by much.

Of course this is another tool and maybe Claude uses better sources or a better algorithm, but in this case where there was a concrete number tied to the results, that while not perfect, aims to rate the quality of a result, it still did not filter out low quality answers. I’m not sure I trust these LLMs to do any better when there aren’t such ratings available. The available input data is just not very good, and now LLMs are being used to feed that low quality, SEO machine.

stephencoyner - a month ago

When I try to prompt it with something that obviously needs up to date web search (when will Minneola Tangelos be in season this year?) it says..

"I believe they're usually available from November through March, but I'm not completely certain about the exact timing for this year's crop. Would you like me to search for more current information about the 2025 tangelo season?"

It doesn't just search, it wants me to confirm. This has happened a lot for me.

gcanyon - a month ago

Funny, I literally just two days ago asked Claude to provide an outline of the functionality of a product, giving it the web site. It of course refused. So I downloaded the text of the site and passed that in, and got mediocre results.

The results based on giving the source URL directly were better. Still a bit generic and high-level and vague, as LLMs tend to be, but better than the text-download version a couple days ago. And of course much easier to generate!

ralusek - a month ago

Best models for search, in order:

OpenAI Deep Research

Grok Deep Search

Gemini Deep Research

Grok + Search

Gemini + Search

ChatGPT + Search

These are just my opinions, but I do use this feature all the time. Haven't used Claude enough to get a sense of where it would fit in.

ignoramous - a month ago

These are interesting times.

It wasn't long ago that a uni senior who worked for a decade+ on Google Search told me that it was hopeless anyone tries to compete with Google not because it sees a tonne of signals that helps with IR but because of its in-house AI/ML.

It turns out that the org that built the ultimate AI/ML that runs rings around anything that came before it for NLP (and thus IR) was a sister team at Google Translate.

It isn't inconceivable that a kid might be able to build a Google-quality web search, scalability aside, on CommonsCrawls data in a weekend. As someone who built re-ranking algorithms for a search engine built atop Yahoo! and Wikipedia (REST/SOAP) APIs back in the late 2000s as a side project (and experienced the launch and subsequent iterations of Echo/Alexa up close at Amazon), the current capabilities (of even the open weight multi-modal models) seem too good to be true.

Google itself though is saved by its enormous distribution advantages afforded by Chrome (3B to 5B users) and Android (3B+), aside from its search deals with Apple and other browser vendors.

beezle - a month ago

At this point it is probably easier to poison web pages for AI crawlers in a way that does not taint the human experience.

DeathArrow - a month ago

Do they have their own search engine or use an external one. If they use Google I would worry about relevance.

andreygrehov - a month ago

Two things.

1. I generally prefer that an LLM not search the web. The top N results are often either SEO spam, excessively long articles created solely to rank well, or long-established websites that gained authority years ago, when Google's crawler and ranking algorithms were less sophisticated.

2. Web search by LLMs is likely here to stay, so I'm curious whether there's an agent-friendly web format. For example, when an RSS reader visits a website, the site responds with an RSS feed. I think we need something similar for agents - an open standard that all websites would support. This could reduce processing overhead and potentially improve the accuracy of the information retrieved. Thoughts?

NewJazz - a month ago

Bizarre that they choose to publish this right as a thread criticizing AI crawlers gets bumped off the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413

mvieira38 - a month ago

What's up with the geoblocking of Claude features? Not the first time it happens

pixelkink - a month ago

Not to sound snarky but Anthropic introduced function calling over a year ago... The capability was always there for someone that wanted to spend a weekend coding a tool for it.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family?_hsenc=p2ANqt...

deadbabe - a month ago

Is no one concerned about LLMs just feeding people SEO ads as content?

light_triad - a month ago

Good news. I integrated Claude with a scrapper to get info from pages and it was not giving hallucinations 99% of the time. Hope this works out of the box now.

n_ary - a month ago

Off-topic: Mistral already had web search enabled for a while on there free tier.

Caveat: Mistral reasoning model on free tier is super slow(2-5 token/sec).

firloop - a month ago

Any information on what search engine is powering it?

BaculumMeumEst - a month ago

Can you search the web for probable corrections to broken links? Has anyone had luck doing this with a web enabled model?

artembugara - a month ago

Search the web is apparently using SERP.

It’s just breaks my head. We’ve build LLMs that can process millions of pages at a time. But what we give them is a search engine that is optimized for humans.

It’s like giving a humanoid robot access to a keyboard with a mouse to chat with another humanoid robot.

Disclaimer: I might be biased as we’re kind of building the fact search engine for LLMs.

itpcc - a month ago

Now I understand why Gitlab was (is?) attacked[0] by those hideous bots.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413

tgtweak - a month ago

Feels like a catch-up feature to chatgpt... honestly the biggest holdback for me on anthropic is the output token limit on sonnet... 8000 tokens max output is really limited (and 200k tokens in) compared to other offerings - especially considering that I suspect most sonnet users are not chat-users but api users.

monkeydust - a month ago

Which frontier model provider let's me specific what websites to search and it will only search those?

joeeverjk - a month ago

Funny how we’ve come full circle—LLMs now search the web to answer queries, which is what search engines did originally. The difference? Now the hallucinations come with citations. Curious how long until "web search" just means summarizing Reddit threads again.

AzzyHN - a month ago

They never watched Avenger's 2

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ilaksh - a month ago

I've been using Tavily's search API for my MindRoot agents. Seems to work fairly well and much easier to set up than Google's search API.

Anyone know if there is something better? I was thinking of trying Perplexity maybe.

rmwa - a month ago

Finally - but it will make Claude even better for coding

blensor - a month ago

Funny thing is that I have the obsidian-mcp-tools installed and today claude-desktop just starting fetching stuff from the web through that because it exposes a fetch tool to claude.

So this limitation is a bit arbitrary anyway.

dunefox - a month ago

A bit OT: does anyone have experiences with Mistral AI as a comparison to OpenAI or Anthropic? I would like to stay with a European company, if they're somewhat equivalent.

d--b - a month ago

Next: Claude can now ask random questions to strangers on Reddit.

rgbrgb - a month ago

Is there a way to access the new web browsing capability via API?

matt3210 - a month ago

Does the LLM look at our click ads? If not, it’s a self destructive technology that will get itself blocked as it consumes resources in an unsustainable way

notepad0x90 - a month ago

if everyone is using LLMs to solve problems, in a few years, won't LLMs run out of content to mine? In short, how can the general dumbing down of LLMs and degradation of content used to solve problems be avoided over the long term?

For questions about events and problems that arose after 2025, where would LLMs get information to solve those? and who would be asking those at a forum LLMs can access going forward?

Is the snake eating it's own tail?

mocmoc - a month ago

Please , make your context window bigger , if you do that … that’s it sonet 3.7 it’s amazing but it can’t even finish a dashboard because of that

bfeynman - a month ago

why does perplexity exist anymore? They were one of anthropic's biggest customers and had been finetuning claude models for search for a while.

sylware - a month ago

What I really would like to know: do they use a web crawler with an AI strapped to the mouse and keyboard of a javascript-ed web engine?

McNutty - a month ago

I haven't used Claude yet, but heard many good things. So I'm surprised to see that they're so far behind on this feature.

morisil - a month ago

I added this functionality already some time ago in my Claudine agent:

https://github.com/xemantic/claudine/

It costed roughly 30 lines of code: https://github.com/xemantic/claudine/blob/main/src/commonMai...

l33tbro - a month ago

I still don't get why Claude needs my phone number to sign up. Feels gross and is a such a shame, as their LLM seems great.

douglee650 - a month ago

You know what Claude can't do? Successfully vibe me a solution to:

""" i need a bashrc command that will map the alias "logg" to open macvim to the file at ~/log.txt, then execute the macro defined by "<leader>z" """

Note <leader>z ends with user in insert mode, Claude provides solution below but puts me in edit mode. (I still have to press "i")

alias loggg='mvim ~/log.txt -c "normal \<leader>z"'

akanapuli - a month ago

Wondering what made Anthropic to change their stand from saying before that it is not secure to use web with AI models

g42gregory - a month ago

Anybody knows if this search will works inside Cursor? Do we need to do anything to make 3.7-thinking to search the web?

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cpersona - a month ago

SEO for LLMs looks to have a bright future.

Tewboo - a month ago

This is a huge step forward for AI. Can't wait to see how Claude integrates with other apps.

whatever1 - a month ago

Is it fair use if Claude makes google searches and then presents the results to its users ?

wewewedxfgdf - a month ago

I'm waiting for Claude's API to support projects with file uploads like its web UI.

Heidaradar - a month ago

Kinda surprised it took them this long to add this feature, but glad it's here now

mbs159 - a month ago

Will this work for people using Claude through other services like OpenRouter?

xingwu - a month ago

Hope there will be a tech blog regarding how you index and retrieve the pages.

iamflimflam1 - a month ago

I generally have to resort to telling ChatGPT “do not search the web”. ..

tttym - a month ago

It's like a line of platforms waiting for their own agents for web search

BrouteMinou - a month ago

I, too, can search the web.

We finally went full circle? LLM is used as a search engine?

ksajadi - a month ago

I can hear the sigh of relief from "SEO gurus" from here...

goatmeal - a month ago

kagi already lets me use claude to search the web. how is this different?

hansmayer - a month ago

So, referring specifically to the example they show on the front-page, what value does this bring actually? The best example they could come up with is Typescript migration ? Really? Weren't the LLMs supposed to be a superior alternative to searching the web? Why do we need to produce more CO2 to do the same we could have done at the fraction of the cost, of course at the time when the google search was still working?

ingen0s - a month ago

Can’t believe they are making us vpn for this

luxuryballs - a month ago

Time to ask it to find all the dirt on me?

danirogerc - a month ago

Couldn't a lot of front-ends using Claude API do this already? What's new?

dostick - a month ago

Anyone noticed that if you enable the “browse internet” in ChatGPT, it becomes very dumb? It abandons all its intelligence and produces mostly incorrect results. Like it’s being passive-aggressive, “Oh, you don’t like me as I am and want to augment me with search, let me show you how it is if my brain was only search!”

livingmylife01 - a month ago

This is insane. Guys you think it will someday replace google?

themagician - a month ago

What is there to even search anymore? Almost everything is gated, and whatever remains public is connected a faucet that pumps out AI slop at an ever increasing rate.

The internet consumed itself. Telling someone to, "Just Google it," is now terrible general advice.

greatNespresso - a month ago

Woaw, so excited about this! Has anyone tried it out already?

dankobgd - a month ago

wow so cool and usefull, said nobody ever

bosky101 - a month ago

We need a way to collapse comments on HN

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nokun7 - a month ago

Honestly, while this is a great update and all, other AI platforms have had web search functionality for quite some time now. Any explanation for this delay?

I wonder if Claude’s API will match Perplexity’s dynamic answers. Is there API rate limiting. If so, then the older API pricing would be preferable. Can users switch between the two?

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lihua919 - a month ago

great

Taters91 - a month ago

so can I

nimish - a month ago

So what's perplexity's raison detre at this point?

ConanRus - a month ago

finally

ProofHouse - a month ago

Awesome, but I also do want to say it’s pretty sad it took this long straight up. Literally no excuse. But I’m glad they finally got to a feature that was launched more than a year ago on competitors.

ForTheKidz - a month ago

Great, now we just need a decent search engine.

zxvkhkxvdvbdxz - a month ago

Wake me up when we go back to discussing progress, instead of being wooed by fake toddlers doing tricks badly.

scudsworth - a month ago

"claude can now ddos random websites . . . more so"

hackburg - a month ago

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startifyai - a month ago

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blazenby - a month ago

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stealthlogic - a month ago

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dangapeass - a month ago

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enveks - a month ago

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mediumsmart - a month ago

thats great - the web he has been trained on or the one from Google?

jason_zig - a month ago

Curious - does anyone want this stuff?

Brusco_RF - a month ago

Excited to see how this compares to Perplexity or Gemini. I remember that ChatGPT used to be able to search the web, but last I checked it it couldn't. I wonder why they removed that feature

punkpeye - a month ago

There is already a 100 ways of doing it using MCP

https://glama.ai/mcp/servers?searchTerm=search

What's the benefit of bringing native integration?

hoppp - a month ago

I just read about llm bots ddosing websites and i guess more of that is coming soon. Big money is bettin on AI eatin the web and the small fishes pay for the bandwidth.