Le Chat is a powerful assistant, capable of handling a wide range of tasks and questions. But what happens when you need information that’s beyond its training data?
That’s where Web search comes into play. To help you access the latest information or dive into niche topics, we’ve enhanced le Chat’s capabilities with live internet search.
📌 By design, 🔎 LLMs are trained on data up to a specific point in time (known as their knowledge cutoff date) and cannot learn new information after their training is complete. Browsing the web allows you to overcome this limitation.
How to enable Web search
Web search is enabled by default for new conversations. If you’ve disabled it in the past, simply click the Tools button in the chat input bar (1) and select Web search (2) to re-activate it.
Enabling Web search in le Chat
Browsing the web
Once enabled, using Web search is seamless: ask your question as you normally would, and le Chat will automatically search the web if necessary.
Let’s try a practical example:
Now that I’m in Paris, I want to know what are the top ten museums to visit. I type:
Searching for the top ten museums in Paris
Recognizing that this question requires up-to-date info, le Chat automatically searches the web:
Le Chat’s response with sources outlined
Notice in the screenshot above how le Chat indicates that it has searched the web with a “globe” icon (1).
Its response (2) is detailed and includes a numbered list of the top ten museums in Paris, along with brief descriptions, but most importantly, it provides links to the original sources (3).
🔑 At Mistral AI, verifiability is a top priority. Whenever le Chat performs a web search, it provides the sources. You can click on the links to verify the information individually, or view all sources at once by using the Sources button (see screenshots below).
The sources button at the bottom of the response
The sources panel showing links to original websites
Searching the news
In addition to browsing the web, le Chat can search news from two verified sources: AFP (Agence France-Presse) and AP (Associated Press), two of the world’s leading news agencies.
This adds another layer of trust and reliability to the information provided.
Let’s say I want to fetch the latest news about the French woman football team. Le Chat can do that for me:
See the “news” icon (1) next to the “globe” icon? That means le Chat has searched the news, here from AFP.
As before, you can verify the information by clicking on the link (pointed by the red arrow) or by using the Sources button.
Next steps
Now you’ve seen how le Chat can search the web to answer your questions in real time. This is great for quick, targeted searches and is the most common use case.
But what if you need more in-depth, thorough research on a particular topic? Let’s explore how le Chat can assist you with that in the next section.