Short answer: it depends on your use case. For general conversational search, current best picks are ChatGPT Search (OpenAI), Microsoft Bing Copilot/Copilot Search, and Google’s Gemini/AI Mode. For research and verifiable answers use Perplexity (or Elicit for academic papers). For developers use Phind. For privacy-focused searching try DuckDuckGo or You.com. Below is a compact breakdown so you can pick quickly.

Top picks by use case (one-line pros + sources)

• Best all‑around conversational search: ChatGPT Search — very strong natural-language understanding, integrated web search and source links, and broad platform availability. (openai.com)

• Best Microsoft/Windows integrated option: Bing + Copilot Search — combines traditional results with generative summaries, citations, visual search and deep Office/M365 integrations. Good when you want action (bookings, travel, Office tasks). (blogs.bing.com)

• Best Google experience / mainstream web coverage: Google AI Mode / Gemini — Google is pushing an “AI Mode” that gives AI overviews inside Search and is moving toward making that more prominent; strong for broad web coverage and maps/data. (techradar.com)

• Best for verifiable, citation‑first answers: Perplexity — built to return concise answers with numbered citations and a research‑style workflow (note: it’s also the target of recent publisher legal challenges you should be aware of). (perplexity.ai)

• Best for academic literature / systematic reviews: Elicit — specializes in semantic literature search, paper summarization and data extraction across millions of papers. (elicit.com)

• Best for developers / code search: Phind — tailored to programming queries, cites docs/StackOverflow/GitHub and offers editor integrations. (phindai.com)

• Best privacy‑first options: DuckDuckGo (Duck.ai) and You.com — both offer optional AI answers, model selection and stronger privacy controls compared with ad‑driven engines. DuckDuckGo emphasizes anonymized queries and opt‑out controls; You.com focuses on user control/customization. (duckduckgo.com)

How to choose in one sentence

• If you want natural conversation + broad capabilities: try ChatGPT Search; if you want search with strong web‑ecosystem integration & actions: try Bing Copilot; if you need verifiable citations for research, use Perplexity or Elicit; if you write code, use Phind; if privacy matters most, use DuckDuckGo or You.com. (openai.com)

Quick practical tip

• Don’t rely on a single answer: for important facts, run the same query in an AI search (ChatGPT/Bing/Perplexity) and open the cited sources to verify. AI summaries are fast but can still hallucinate—checking original sources is the safest habit. (perplexity.ai)

If you want, I can:

• give a 2‑minute micro walkthrough for any one of these (how to ask prompts for best results), or
• run your exact search query across two or three of these engines and summarize differences.

Which of those would you like me to show you first?