Move over, Perplexity. There’s a new AI-powered search engine in town — and its creators think it can best the many, many other attempts out there.
Called Genspark, the platform taps generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries. Type in a search like, “What’s the best baby formula for newborns?” and Genspark will generate a Sparkpage: a single-page overview pieced together from websites and content around the web.
It’s an experience similar (conspicuously so) to Arc browser’s Arc Search feature, which launched earlier this year, and Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search. But Eric Jing, who co-founded the eponymous org behind Genspark with Kay Zhu in 2023, claims that Genspark is able to deliver higher-quality results by embracing a more surgical approach.
“Genspark uses multiple specialized AI models, each designed to tackle specific types of queries,” Jing told TechCrunch. “Sparkpages are much like a distillation and consolidation of the current web; we also enrich these with comprehensive data, and to users, it looks like an index to the existing web.”
Under the hood, Genspark relies on models trained in-house as well as third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others to categorize users’ search queries and determine how to organize — and present — the results. A basic AI-generated summary populates the top of every results page, followed by a link to a much more detailed Sparkpage.
For example, for travel-related searches, Genspark will serve up a Wikipedia-like Sparkpage complete with a table of contents, videos of popular nearby destinations, tips and a chatbot to field questions about various sub-topics (e.g. “List the best cultural experiences”). Product searches on Genspark, meanwhile, yield Sparkpages with a pros-and-cons list about the product being discussed, as well as aggregated comments and reviews from social media, publications and e-commerce stores.
“Our AI models favor webpages with high authority and popularity, which does a lot to filter out the more ‘out there’ information,” Jing said.
Much has been written about AI-generated overviews gone wrong. Google’s AI Overviews infamously suggested putting glue on a pizza. Arc Search told one reporter that cut-off toes will eventually grow back. And Perplexity ripped off articles written by outlets including CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes without giving credit or attribution.
So has Genspark solved all the safety and accuracy problems? Well, not quite.
Source: techcrunch.com