Opinion: Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine

Google has certainly gone downhill, but after trying to use Perplexity a couple months ago after a friend espoused how great it was, I quickly gave up on it. I was mostly using it to figure out specific technical terms related to architecture. Google was feeding me so much SEO'ed crap from random construction companies that just repeated the same stuff.

At first Perplexity seemed great, even providing links to the the sources it was drawing its answers from. But after the fifth or so time of not finding the terms it was claiming as real in any of its cited sources, I gave up. And the sources it was citing weren't even particularly good, just the same ones Google was surfacing.

Since everything could just be a hallucination, I was wasting even more time using it than Google. And even when Perplexity isn't hallucinating, I still can't just how trustworthy its sources are without clicking on them, which is another huge problem with searches like that. The context the information is presented in matters as much as the information itself.

I've switched to using Claude for most of my "queries" that are not me searching for a particular document and virtually all of my coding questions. It's very good when you have a question about a broader topic that you want to be able to ask lots of specific questions about.

The experience really reminds me of when Google original appeared on the scene in the early 2000s. It was the first time on the web that you could easily find anything and the first search engine that didn't feel overrun by spam.

There have been many topics I've wanted to understand better that essentially require a dive into multiple wikipedia pages. Claude makes wandering around that graph unnecessary and really accelerates the learning/exploration process.

It also allows queries that were previously impossible, for example "tell me if this movie has a happy ending but otherwise don't give me any spoilers".

Initially I wasn't sure I would personally ever use LLMs as an alternative to search, but as I've learned to treat them differently than a standard search engine I find for many cases there's no reason to return to the ever decaying mess that is Google in it's current form.

I've came to use Brave search [1] lately, and find it is super convenient with the auto-AI-based answers based on the top search results (or at the click of a button if it isn't triggered automatically), combined with the no-frills design (once a hallmark of Google(!)).

The ability to ask various questions right from the browser location bar without login is convenient and a surprisingly big deal IMO.

[1] https://search.brave.com/

It's insanely bad. I asked Perplexity: "What are some places named after Alexander Hamilton?" It's answers: Fort Hamilton, Ohio (technically correct, except this is now known as simply Hamilton, not Fort Hamilton); Hamilton, Ontaria; Hamilton, NZ; Hamilton, NSW. None of those last three are correct.

I asked Google the same question and it has the Wikipedia page "List of things named after Alexander Hamilton" as the top organic result, with nothing ranked above it (ads included). It also offered an AI summary that isn't totally, flagrantly incorrect, listing Hamilton Place, Hamilton Hall, and Hamilton Heights in New York.

People who write these articles about search quality are blinded by some unstated ideology.

AI chatbots as search interfaces will only exacerbate the current issues with google search. What I personally need is a search engine that actually returns me the documents containing my search term and respects the search operators I provide.

Wow, this looks awful. The cited sources are questionable at best, and on my first attempt it's already hallucinating. How can you trust something like this?

Also, how do I get it to return documents? I searched for 'RFC 793' with the intend to read the actual RFC. Instead, the chat bot summarized it for me (which is pointless) and doesn't even use the actual RFC as a source?

Since this is a "Google bad" thread, I feel obligated to mention Kagi which I've been using for nearly a year and it has significantly improved my search experience (better search quality, great customizability).

Stop using generative AI as a search engine[0]

0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-b...

Looks like Perplexity includes sponsored results at the bottom of your searches, and my UBO isn't blocking them. They seem to be fairly unobtrusive, though, and they are labeled as such. For now, at least.

If I had a dollar every time someone on the Internet announced Google's demise I would be very happy.

Also, to think that AI-enabled search will deliver us from ads is naive. SEO firms talk and pitch about AI constantly, either to push brands inside chat responses, or, yes, to taint public datasets with pointless articles whose only purpose is to do product placement.

I very much doubt Google is about to go down; but if it does go down, we will miss it.

In my opinion, the mistake that a lot of companies are making with search is that most times I'm not looking for an answer. I'm looking for a document that contains an answer.

I don't want AI generated crap. I want the document, I will take care of jumping and reading the relevant section.

I like Kagi overall but I think they are investing too much on AI instead of improving their infrastructure (lately it takes a few seconds to get results)

I used to think Perplexity was terrible, then I fixed my settings and I love it.

Key settings to adjust:

* Always use "Pro mode" searches

* Set the model to 3.5 sonnet in settings

Once you do those two things, you'll have a good time and after a week you'll dread going back to google.

Is this an advertorial?

Are people getting paid to promote Kagi in here too? Like, you have to log in to use it. Already that makes it worse than Google.

How can any search engine be good now that Google has given us a world of SEO spam through their advertising business?

This is just an opinion piece with little justification that does a pretty good job of undermining the clickbait-y title with the very first sentence:

> Opinion Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.

Second, this whole "Google sucks" narrative is (IMHO) completely manufactured by those pushing another product or those with clickbait-y titles to opinion pieces. Or it's just self-delusion by people who want it to be true because they're contrarian or don't like Google for whatever reason (justified or not).

We've been hearing this for years about DDG at this point.

Chatbots are nowhere near ready to replace the utility of Google. It's not even close. Even things like auto complete as you type are incredibly useful. Googling a place will usually give you a map link for the place in addition to other links.

And chatbots can be confidently wrong about things in a way Google really isn't. Google can lead you to links with wrong information but that's not usually the same thing. There's something to be said for the "authority" concept in Google search ranking.

The only reliable takeaway from this is that we will continue to predict the death of Google, just as we have been for at least 15 years [1].

[1]: https://technologizer.com/2009/05/19/a-brief-history-of-goog...

TL;DR: https://www.perplexity.ai and it's not better