Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me

I like Perplexity but honestly, it lacks "depth" and it doesn't follow instructions very well.

I don't know how it works in the backend but If I ask for a list of sites about some topic what happens it that it gives me the results of a quick search. I've tried to make it really go deep and provide a comprehensive list of links but it never does.

I guess there are multiple problems in such task, like the context of the model, the computational cost of doing such task in the background, etc.

So for me Perplexity is the equivalent of scanning the first page and saving me like 20 minutes/keyword maybe? That's cool enough, but it's not helping when I want to research a topic a bit more deep.

As junior I have coding questions frequently, specially on documentation, and it's better than chat models at it but still pretty limited. And I've spend a fair amount of time trying to make it work, there's a lot of difficult documentation out there and I would love to have a helping hand.

Phind is better at this, the problem with Phind is that is slow, and sometimes you get a blank page. I guess they are overloaded and have less funding than perplexity, thus less money to burn on resources.

What I'm wondering about such companies is how exactly are they going to make a profit. I've tried GPT4 and it's cool and all but still hesitant to pay 20 bucks for it. Maybe if I get a dev job I would think differently but still find myself discarding results often.

It’s perplexity.ai, which is what Arc started pushing recently. YMMV, I asked it some technical questions and got responses back which were far too generic to act upon. Might have pointed me in the right direction for a Kagi search though if I was clueless on the subject.