Claude has been my favourite AI chatbot for quite some time. Interestingly only for work, I don’t find Claude quite has ChatGPT's ability to have a little chat about my life or thoughts on being a founder. I’ve found it codes better, and when it actually replies in British English, it helps with grant writing (although ChatGPT is getting there).
But the one thing it has been lacking compared to other chatbots is its ability to search the web. Copilot, Gemini, Le Chat, Perplexity and ChatGPT have all been able to do this for some time. Now Claude can as well (at least if you’re paying for the pro or max versions).
Trying Claude’s Web Search Out
I logged in and was initially a little confused - ChatGPT, Copilot and Mistral all have a specific web search button.
Claude’s was hidden as a toggle under the filters, and automatically set to on.
Claude's prompt window with the filter options
I tried to think of something that would force Claude to use web search, and came up with something extremely basic.
L: are there any grants for an edtech company currently open?
And it now lets you know it’s searching the web (which is a feature I quite like).
Claude showcasing its new web searching abilities
When it’s finished it shows you which websites it looked at.
Claude showcasing the websites it searched
This weirded me out a little as I haven’t mentioned Bristol in this chat, and I didn’t know Claude has memory.
While the results brought back were useful, most of them had deadlines in the past (I’m assuming Claude doesn’t know what date today is).
L: what date do you think it is
Claude: Today is Tuesday, May 6th, 2025. That's the current date according to my system information. I notice that in our conversation, I've been providing information about grants and opportunities for edtech companies that appear to be current as of 2025, which aligns with this date. Is there anything specific about the date that you're concerned about? I'm happy to clarify or provide more current information if needed.
Turns out it does not, it just doesn’t have a concept of what dates have passed.
Delving a Bit Deeper
L: do you know what Taught by Humans does?
And it did - this is a big improvement. Often when asking before it said no unless I shared documents. It did post a lot of information (including my home address which has weirded me out a little…)
However, I think there are still some tweaks which need to be ironed out, including that it seems to jump to doing research and then keep going for a while until it is happy. I’ll call out here that the default model in Claude is Claude Sonnet 3.7 which is a reasoning model, and I try to avoid using the reasoning models in ChatGPT (currently o3 and o4). So maybe it’s more me getting used to using this rather than a problem with the web search.