What is perplexity search engine?
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine and research assistant that aims to provide concise, accurate answers to user queries by leveraging artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Here are some key aspects of Perplexity:
Functionality
Perplexity uses large language models to generate answers based on information gathered from across the web[1]. Unlike traditional search engines that provide a list of links, Perplexity delivers a summarized answer with inline citations to its sources.
Key features include:
- Natural language queries: Users can ask questions in plain language
- AI-generated summaries: Concise answers synthesized from multiple sources
- Cited sources: Links to original sources are provided for verification
- Follow-up questions: Suggested related queries to explore topics further
- Copilot mode: Asks clarifying questions to refine searches
Technology
Perplexity utilizes various AI models, including:
The system combines web crawling, natural language processing, and AI to generate its responses.
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had no idea Perplexity had its own model and I use it almost everyday
Company Background
Company Background
User Experience
Perplexity offers both free and paid versions:
The interface is designed to be simple, with a central search box similar to Google[3]. However, instead of a list of links, users receive a paragraph or two summarizing the answer to their query.
While Perplexity has gained attention for its innovative approach, it's worth noting that it's still a relatively new player in the search engine market. As with any AI-powered tool, users should be aware of potential limitations and verify important information from primary sources.
Can this AI-powered search engine replace Google? it has for me
A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with artificial intelligence.
But recently, I’ve been stepping out on Google with a new, artificial intelligence-powered search engine. (No, not Bing, which is dead to me after it tried to break up my marriage last year.)
It’s called Perplexity. The year-old search engine, whose founders previously worked in AI research at OpenAi and Meta, has quickly become one of the most buzzed-about products in the tech world. Tech insiders rave about it on social media, and investors such as Jeff Bezos — who was also an early investor in Google — have showered it with cash. The company recently announced that it had raised $74 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, which valued the company at $520 million.
Many startups have tried and failed to challenge Google over the years. (One would-be competitor, Neeva, shut down last year after failing to gain traction.) But Google seems less invincible these days. Many users have complained that their Google search results have gotten clogged with spammy, low-quality websites, and some people have started looking for answers in places such as Reddit and TikTok instead.
Festive offer
Intrigued by the hype, I recently spent several weeks using Perplexity as my default search engine on both desktop and mobile. I tested both the free version and the paid product, Perplexity Pro, which costs $20 per month and gives users access to more powerful AI models and certain features, such as the ability to upload their own files.
Hundreds of searches later, I can report that even though Perplexity isn’t perfect, it’s very good. And while I’m not ready to break up with Google entirely, I’m nOW more convinced that AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity could loosen Google’s grip on the search market or at least force it to play catch-up.
I’m also scared that AI search engines could destroy my job and that the entire digital media industry could collapse as a result of products like them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Where It Shines
At first glance, Perplexity’s desktop interface looks a lot like Google’s — a text box centered on a sparse landing page.
But as soon as you start typing, the differences become obvious. When you ask a question, Perplexity doesn’t give you back a list of links. Instead, it scours the web for you and uses AI to write a summary of what it finds. These answers are annotated with links to the sources the AI used, which also appear in a panel above the response.
I tested Perplexity on hundreds of queries, including questions about current events (“How did Nikki Haley do in the New Hampshire primary?”), shopping recommendations (“What’s the best dog food for a senior dog with joint pain?”) and household tasks (“How long does beef stew stay good in the fridge?”).
Each time, I got back an AI-generated response, generally a paragraph or two long, sprinkled with citations to websites such as NPR, The New York times and Reddit, along with a list of suggested follow-up questions I could ask, such as “Can you freeze beef stew to make it last longer?”
One impressive Perplexity feature is “Copilot,” which helps a user narrow down a query by asking clarifying questions. When I asked for ideas on where to host a birthday party for a 2-year-old, for example, Copilot asked whether I wanted suggestions for outdoor spaces, indoor spaces or both. When I selected “indoor,” it asked me to choose a rough budget for the Party. Only then did it give me a list of possible venues.
Perplexity also allows users to search within a specific set of sources, such as academic papers, YouTube videos or Reddit posts. This came in handy when I was looking up how to change a setting on my house’s water heater. (Exciting stuff, I know.) A Google search yielded a bunch of less-than-helpful links to DIY tutorials, some of which were thinly veiled ads for plumbing companies. I tried the same query on Perplexity and narrowed my search to YouTube videos. Perplexity found the video I needed for my exact model of water heater, extracted the relevant information from the video and turned it into step-by-step instructions.
Under the hood, Perplexity runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model along with its own AI model — a variant of Meta’s open-source Llama 2 model. Users who upgrade to the Pro version can choose between a handful of different models, including GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude. (I used GPT-4 for most of my searches, but I didn’t see much of a difference in the quality of the answers when I chose other models.)
Perplexity is also refreshingly good at admitting when it doesn’t know something. Sometimes, it gave a partial response to my question, with a caveat like “No further details are provided in the search results.” Most AI chat products I’ve used lack this kind of humility; their responses sound confident even when they’re spouting nonsense.
Where Google Still Reigns
During my tests, I found Perplexity most useful for complicated or open-ended searches, such as summarizing recent news articles about a specific company or giving me suggestions for date-night restaurants. I also found it useful when what I was looking for — instructions for renewing a passport, for example — was buried on a crowded, hard-to-navigate website.
But I did sneak back to Google for a few types of searches — usually, when I was looking up specific people or trying to go to websites I already knew existed. For example, when I typed “Wayback Machine” into my browser’s search bar, I was redirected to Perplexity, which spit out a paragraph-long essay about the history of the Internet Archive, the organization that maintains the Wayback Machine. I had to hunt for a small citation link to get to the Wayback Machine’s website, which is what I wanted in the first place.
A similar thing happened when I asked Perplexity for driving directions to a work meeting. Google would have given me turn-by-turn directions from my house, thanks to its integration with Google Maps. But Perplexity doesn’t know where I live, so the best it could offer me was a link to MapQuest.
Location data is just one of the many advantages Google has over Perplexity. Size is another; Perplexity, which has just 41 employees and is based out of a shared working space in San Francisco, has 10 million monthly active users, an impressive number for a young startup but a speck compared with Google’s billions.
Perplexity also lacks a lucrative business model. Right NOW, the site has no ads, and fewer than 100,000 people paying for the premium version, said Aravind Srinivas, the company’s CEO. (Srinivas didn’t rule out switching to an ads-based model in the future.) And, of course, Perplexity doesn’t offer versions of Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Docs or any of the dozens of other products that make Google’s ecosystem so inescapable.
Srinivas said that while he believed Google was a formidable competitor, he thought that a small, focused startup could give it a startle.
“What makes me confident is the fact that if they want to do it better than us, they would basically have to kill their own business model,” he said.
What About Hallucinations?
One problem with AI-based search engines is that they tend to hallucinate, or make up answers, and sometimes stray from their source material. This problem has haunted several AI-search hybrids, including Google’s initial release of Bard, and it remains one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption.
In my testing, I found that Perplexity’s answers were mostly accurate — or, to be more precise, they were as accurate as the sources they drew upon.
I did find a few errors. When I asked Perplexity when Novak Djokovic’s next tennis match was, it gave me the details of a match he’d already finished. Another time, when I uploaded a PDF file of a new AI research paper and asked Perplexity to summarize it, I got a summary of an entirely different paper that was published three years ago.
Srinivas acknowledged that AI-powered search engines still made mistakes. He said that because Perplexity was a small, relatively obscure product, users didn’t expect it to be as authoritative as Google — and that Google would struggle to build generative AI into its search engine because it needed to uphold its reputation for accuracy.
“Let’s say you use our product, and we do well on 8 out of 10 queries. You’d be impressed,” Srinivas said. “Now let’s say you use Google’s product, and it only gets 7 out of 10. You’d be like, ‘How can Google get three queries wrong?’
“That asymmetry is our opportunity,” he added.
A Win for Users, a loss for Publishers
Even though I enjoyed using Perplexity, and I’m likely to keep using it in tandem with Google, I’ll admit that I got a gnawing feeling in my stomach after seeing it spit out pristine, concise summaries of news stories, product reviews and how-to articles.
Much of today’s digital media economy still relies on a steady flow of people clicking on links from Google and being served ads on publishers’ websites.
But with Perplexity, there’s usually no need to visit a website at aLL; the AI does the browsing for you and gives you all the information you need right there on the answer page.
The possibility that AI-powered search engines could replace Google traffic — or spur Google to put similar features into its search engine, as it has started doing with its “search generative experience” experiment — is partly why many digital publishers are terrified right now. It’s also part of the reason some are fighting back, including the Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement last year.
After using Perplexity and hearing about similar products being developed by other startups, I’m convinced that the worriers have a point. If AI search engines can reliably summarize what’s happening in the Gaza Strip or tell users which toaster to buy, why would anyone visit a publisher’s website ever again? Why would journalists, bloggers and product reviewers continue to put their work online if an AI search engine is just going to gobble it up and regurgitate it?
I brought these fears up to Srinivas, who responded with a diplomatic dodge. He conceded that Perplexity would probably send less traffic to websites than traditional search engines. But he said the traffic that remained would be higher quality and easier for publishers to monetize, because it would be the result of better, more targeted queries.
X
I brought these fears up to Srinivas, who responded with a diplomatic dodge. He conceded that Perplexity would probably send less traffic to websites than traditional search engines. But he said the traffic that remained would be higher quality and easier for publishers to monetize, because it would be the result of better, more targeted queries.
I’m skeptical of that argument, and I’m still nervous about what the future holds for writers, publishers and people who consume online media.
So for now, I’ll have to weigh the convenience of using Perplexity against the worry that, by using it, I’m contributing to my own doom.
I Tried Perplexity For a Week, And I Don't Think AI Search Engines Can Replace Google.. Yet
The fact that I began this experiment a week later than I had originally planned should tell you all you need to know about how entrenched Google Search is in our lives. I can’t specifically tell you why I didn’t want to switch search engines, let alone to one that was powered by artificial intelligence, but I can tell you for a fact that I tried to delay the switch for as long as possible.. until I couldn’t.
There has been a lot of talk recently about Google Search and how its results have become worse, but that's not really the reason why I decided to switch search engines. I did it because I did not believe we had reached a point where Google Search’s utility and dominance could be challenged.
In some ways, I was proven wrong. In some ways, I was proven right.
What began as an opportunity for me to try a Google alternative turned into a deep exploration into why it was so hard to transition away from a service that has become synonymous with the internet itself and why the best-case scenario for services like Perplexity is not to upend Google, but to co-exist with it.
Perplexity isn’t the first search engine seeking to entice users away from Google. It’s only one of the latest, and one of a very few that use generative artificial intelligence to power its results.
Founded in 2022 by former employees of OpenAI, Meta, Quora, and Databricks, Perplexity hit the scene just around the same time ChatGPT launched. Soon, it began making headlines for its mouth watering valuation and the millions it was raising from notable investors.
Despite quickly becoming a valuable company, Perplexity is very much an underdog. Its estimated valuation of between $1 billion and $3 billion pales in comparison to OpenAI’s $100 billion price tag and its search engine processes less than 1% of user queries in an entire year than Google does in a month, based on figures available for 2023.
Yet, Perplexity distinguishes itself for how it functions. Its AI chatbot scours the internet for answers, listing citations for its results, and the company emphasizes accuracy as its unique selling point.
So strong is Perplexity’s allure that Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told Wired in February that he used it almost every day. Though it’s worth noting that Nvidia invested in the company a month prior to the interview being published, so it may be in Huang’s interest to present himself as a fan.
Besides Huang, Jeff Bezos also took part in the January fundraising, solidifying Perplexity’s reputation as a start up on the radar of the who’s who of the tech world.
While I did occasionally follow developments from Perplexity, it was in fact a contributor at HackerNoon who encouraged me to to try it out for a week based on their own rave experience.
With the backing of so much star power, how could I refuse? So after delaying it for a week, I decided that I would switch search engines the following Monday, come what may.
From Reddit:
I love arc and its integration of AI features; however, I was surprised to see the perplexity integration. Can somebody give me a rundown on what is perplexity? I currently use google through arc, and I have my gmail accounts pinned and different google profiles with my passwords already saved and whatnot. For reference I don't do anything with coding or IT adjacent (which I saw a lot of tech bros hyping up perplexity online) - I am a premed student so making sure my search results are accurate and up to date are significantly important to me.
I guess long story short, is there a hassle when switching from google to perplexity, and if so is it worth it when arc already has so many cool features?
In its most basic form, it tries to understand your question, rephrase it to be better for a Google search, searches, picks a handful of results and summarises it for you with GPT-3.5 (I think turbo? not really sure).
If you use their Copilot feature, it gets much better. It will try to understand your question, split that into multiple focused Google searches, picks a lot of results (sometimes like 25) and condense them into a summary with GPT-4 (or any top model you wish to use). That summary can get lengthy (I've got 2-page ones) as your query gets more complicated. It will also sometimes ask follow-up questions to clearify up your query. You get 5 uses every 4 hours without paying, and something like 600 uses a day if you pay.
You also have the option to complete an "AI Profile", in which you introduce yourself to their model and answer a few questions about yourself. The model will use those info to try to tailor the results to your needs. This profile will be passed on as part of the system prompt in all searches, although Copilot seems to understand it better.
One thing is certain - it won't replace Google. You just can't avoid inaccuracies when dealing with generated text. You will need to go to the results manually to verify them, and sometimes you will need a straight up Google search. It is also a bit slower than Google, since it does need to query an actual search engine and do the summarisation.
The catch? It saves you some decent hassle. It really does. I've used it with multiple of my research works, and while it does take time to verify some of the info, it does saves a bunch of time and effort. There is a feature called "Focus" where you can instruct the engine to only search through focused areas, like academic papers. You can also focus it on writing to have it not search and just generate text.
Hope this gives you a bit of an idea. It is still best to try it on https://perplexity.ai and see for yourself. Keep in mind that you will need to sign up for an account to try Copilot, and you can only use it on their website (unless you manually add a site search that specifies Copilot in the url).
This was very insightful! It seems like a pretty cool concept, however it’s annoying that the copilot limited without paying. Might give it a spin!
f accuracy is important to you, then I would absolutely not be using AI to get information for you. I even asked Perplexity itself for the strengths and weaknesses of AI search, just to see what it would say, and it gave me a list of things like inaccuracy compared to normal search engines as weaknesses and all it could come up with as a strength was that people were working on AI search so that it'll be less inaccurate in the future.
I've tried Perplexity before and just don't like it. To me, it's like using Bing, but only getting Copilot responses instead of a search results page. Plus, they want to charge money for anything beyond their basic features. I don't understand why it's being hyped as a thing, but maybe it's just not to my taste.
I didn't even knew it existed until today. I just tried it and hated it. Won't be using it.
I love it. I have it set as my default arc search, with 'goog' as a trigger for a normal Google search
Honestly depends on your preferences. I tried it, and I found it super useful, and quickly switched to it as my default search engine.
The only time I still use Google is when I need to quickly see a lot of pictures of something as Perplexity provides only couple of the most relevant pictures to your search.
I believe that the Google is already sensing the heat under their arse. I got a couple of questions from them, one being: how much you trust our results. Gave them 2 out of five. In 0political matters they are extremely left and with general searches, paid advertisements can take pages.
Using Perplexity for my specific market research I got some results that Google NEVER even mentioned. To those who don't like it: statistically older professionals are BETTER at using AI, maybe because we are used to spending hours to get the relevant info and have definitely greater attention span that a few nanoseconds young generation has. Also we had to memorize much more technical data, before the web or even PC. I am taking a deep dive into this and expect to spend some serious time to master it.
Perplexity is your AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity.It's now in mid-2024 the top AI tool in the world for white-collar professionals conducting research, trend analysis, and search related queries. But how to use it? How to integrate it into your workflows?