Simon Willison’s Weblog

It's not in their release notes yet but Anthropic pushed some big new features today. Alex Albert:

We've improved web search and rolled it out worldwide to all paid plans. Web search now combines light Research functionality, allowing Claude to automatically adjust search depth based on your question.

Anthropic announced Claude Research a few weeks ago as a product that can combine web search with search against your private Google Workspace - I'm not clear on how much of that product we get in this "light Research" functionality.

I'm most excited about this detail:

You can also drop a web link in any chat and Claude will fetch the content for you.

In my experiments so far the user-agent it uses is Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Claude-User/1.0; +Claude-User@anthropic.com). It appears to obey robots.txt.