Best proprietary LLM these days that includes web search?

Web search was a solved problem before LLMs. All the providers lobotomized their tools as a sacrifice to the god of advertising. LLMs have then been applied and it made the situation worse as now you have hallucinations to contend with.

Can we please go back to straight search?

Kagi has been the closest thing to the google from 2003 that I’ve encountered in a long time. I’ve not tried their assistant that’s only available on the ultimate plan as it’s too expensive for me. FWIW, I have the duo plan, soon to move to the family plan.

The quick answer usually works pretty well and you have access to fastgpt if you want more of the LLM effect.

OpenAI and Claude are head and shoulders above the rest, and have been for more or less the whole race. Gemini occasionally pops into the race and quickly fades away.

It comes down to compute. No small guy is going to ultimately win this race.