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Your coworker looks things up instead of guessing.

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What it does

An AI that can’t search the web is working from memory, and memory goes stale. Web search lets your coworker check the live internet before it answers — so a price is this quarter’s price, and a company’s headcount is the one on their site today. It searches the way you would: forms a query, reads the results, and picks the ones worth following. When it uses something it found, it tells you where it came from.

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When you’d use it

  • Checking whether a company has raised funding before you send a sales email
  • Finding what a competitor currently charges, rather than what they charged last year
  • Confirming a rule, regulation or deadline is still in force
  • Gathering five recent articles on a topic before drafting a brief
  • Looking up a person’s current job title before an introduction
  • Answering “did anything happen with X this week?”

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Turning it on

Open your coworker, choose Capabilities, and find Web search in the Built-in tools list. It’s on by default.
Web search — Search the web for current information.
The Web search row on the Capabilities tab, switched on

Web search on the Capabilities tab. The icon lights up in colour when a capability is on.

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Good to know

Search finds pages; it doesn’t read them in full. Pair this with Reading web pages so your coworker can open the promising results and read them properly. Almost every research job wants both.
Best for facts that change. For anything stable — how a concept works, how to phrase something — your coworker already knows, and searching just slows it down.

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Common questions

Yes. When it uses information it found, it says which page it came from, so you can check it yourself.
No. Search covers the public web. For anything behind a sign-in, use the live browser, which can log in and click through.
Your coworker weighs sources rather than taking the first result, but the web is the web. For anything you’d want to be certain of, ask it to check more than one source — or use Thorough review before it hands the work back.
Turn it off if a coworker should only work from what you give it — a document reviewer, or a coworker handling something confidential where you’d rather nothing leaves the workspace.

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Next steps

Reading web pages

The other half of research.

The live browser

For pages behind a login.

The ready-made five

Meet the research analyst.

All capabilities

Back to the full list.