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.
I wasn’t able to find examples of outright plagiarism on Genspark, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Sparkpages, like Wikipedia pages, aren’t static. After Genspark’s AI creates the outline, anyone can share and edit copies of a Sparkpage and add whatever info they wish — including things that are offensive, wrong or plagiarized.
What’s more — at least right now — there’s no way to report problematic Sparkpages.
Jing says that Sparkpages are open-ended and editable by design to allow users to fact-check claims, and that Genspark’s AI systems take each edit into account to improve results going forward. He also says that Genspark plans to license copyrighted content — including publisher content — where it makes sense, with the goal of improving the engine’s overall accuracy.
“We take data quality seriously, and we believe data quality is the key to win this race,” Jing said. “Respect for intellectual property is a core value.”
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