The Browser Company, which last year issued an iPhone web browser called Arc, has now released Arc Search, which combines artificial intelligence functionality. The five-year-old New York-based company is stressing speed and an absence of clutter for its new search experience, which it concedes is still in “the earliest stages.” The main Arc Search feature is the AI-powered “Browse for Me,” which compiles results from at least six different sources into a summarized presentation informed by models from OpenAI and others. Basically, Browse for Me builds a mini webpage instead of just returning links with abstracts.

When a writer for The Verge typed “What happened in the Chiefs game?” in Arc Search, then clicked Browse for Me, “it scoured the web — reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today — and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later,” including the “Chiefs win” headline, the final score, the key play, and “a ‘notable event’ that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game.”

“If users don’t want to use the AI-powered feature, they can just tap on the query to use Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia — whichever you have set as default,” TechCrunch informs, taking note of the fact that “last week, The Browser Company announced that users can set Perplexity as their default search engine on the Arc’s desktop client,” but it’s unclear if that option is available for mobile users.

“There is also a reader mode for all webpages for easy reading and you can bookmark the webpage as well, but there is no folder system to store these bookmarks,” TechCrunch adds, explaining that the “Arc Search browser also archives tabs after one day (this is customizable) to save you from tab overload,” allowing users to “look at your open tabs through the tab switcher on the bottom bar, or you can swipe and hold from the left edge of the screen.”

The Browser Company’s “big idea about the future of web browsers,” resulting in Arc Search, is that the browser, search engine, AI chatbot and website aren’t that different, “they’re all just parts of an Internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app,” summarizes The Verge.

The privacy-focused Arc Browser for Apple’s macOS and iOS was released by The Browser Company in 2020. A Windows version is currently in beta and users must use a waitlist to join.