AI search engines are revolutionizing the way we search for the information we need. There’s AI Overview by Google and there’s Perplexity AI. The one making noise at the moment is MainFunc’s Genspark.

Another spark in the next-gen search engines:

Genspark is the new kid on the block. It is a product of MainFunc, released in Jun 2024. The co-founders of MainFunc, Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, previously worked for Baidu. Not just that, Eric, also worked with Microsoft Bing and Zhu with Google. You see, they are there for a long time in this field. These experienced fellas joined forces and formed MainFunc.

What is it?

When you type in your prompt, like I searched for ‘Euro 2024 venues’, it gives you results similar to Google. Unlike, Google it doesn’t have pages, but few articles from one or two notable media, a Wikipedia brief and few ‘Sparkpages’, all on a single page. Sparkpages are editable Wikipedia-like content generated to serve you the required information. It may include a table of contents, chatbot, and consolidated information of what you were looking for. In the popup it mentions ‘Powered by GPT-4’, so they are using ChatGPT and probably other LLMs to process the information, along with their trained model to make it unique

Recently, they raised $60 million in a huge seed funding round by a Singapore based firm, Lanchi Ventures. The company’s current valuation now stands at $260 million.

It will be exciting to see how Genspark makes an impact in the coming days, battling the giants. Big or small, they make mistakes, like Google’s incorrect advice or like in case of Perplexity, who were accused by major publications including Forbes, Wired, etc. for scraping their content without permission. Will Genspark be different in handling such challenges? They say that they have taken into consideration these concerns, but I say, only time will tell.

I remember those days when Yahoo was the go-to place for anything you need. Google came and took over, and we forgot the Yahoo. Google has been dominating the market for so long. Google Chrome became everyone’s favorite browser and that coupled with the introduction of Android, made Google Search the most convenient and reliable search engine. Bing came in between but didn’t make a mark until Windows upgraded Microsoft Explorer. Now we have Edge, which defaults to Bing powered with Co-pilot. A new era started with users preferring AI search over the normal search. The best part, everybody is relatively new in this, including Google, Microsoft, Apple. Startups started realizing that it’s a great chance for them to take over the Google Search dominance and lead in the AI race with more innovative approaches.
Genspark and Perplexity are examples of this. But the question is, can they? With Google’s abundance in wealth and their user base, new startups face a tough battle ahead to prove themselves. Let’s wait.

^{Featured Image by Fé Ngô on Unsplash}