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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

Am I understanding perplexity right? You put your query into a system that googles it, then pipes the results through an AI to give you an answer? Doesn't google already do that now with their AI summary at the top of the search results?

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You ask Perplexity questions and it will transform it into a set of web queries that can return relevant results, and then tries to synthesize an answer based on those results. It can also do multi-step searches, where it will break down the question into queries for different parts of the question, and searches that relate the parts of the question. By the end of the process it may have done like a dozen different web searches. You can also ask follow up questions that will retain the previous dialog as context - I am not sure that you can do that with Google.

My understanding is that Perplexity AI doesn't "just Google it". They have their own indexing/crawling engine called PerplexityBot. They also have their own ranking engine, but they use ranking signals from both Google and Bing and combine with their own ranker.

Hopefully their ranking ignores SEO, then it might actually give useful results.

SEO is so depep into the internet its basically impossible. Its cancer. With AI you can generate way more garbage.

What do you mean by ranking signals from Google?

You're right! This is actually one of people's concerns about Perplexity's future.

Additionally, the way I see it, running a local Perplexity alternative is not necessarily for better results, but for better privacy protection. Plus, it's cool.

No he is not right. They don’t google stuff they maintain their own crawler and index which they query

Who's "he"? Also you might want to contact the author of the post then, because it talks a lot about how Perplexity searches for things on Google

The article is not correct. Perplexity has its own crawler and crawls sites directly.

The nice thing about Perplexity is its source annotation. It will show you in real time how it's arriving at its data capture(s), and then annotate the results accordingly.

It really is a lovely service. It has replaced the "normal" search engine for me, for most of my queries. And has completely replaced ChatGPT/Claude as it can fulfill those needs directly (and even let me choose to use one of those models).

They also have an OpenAI-compatible API. I use it in conjunction with https://github.com/thmsmlr/instructor_ex

Maybe its region specific, but I don't see any AI summary when I search in Google.

I get it on maybe half of my searches in the UK

I've never seen it, but I don't think they support Safari, for whatever reason.

Correct. In practice perplexity is quite a nice experience though. Currently (!!) no ads, no clicking through, just the answer in text.

There are rumours of ads coming though...unclear if just the free version or not

I'm a happy customer. They provide a good service that saves me hundreds of tiny chunks of time during research. The instant ads hit, I'm out. Any distraction from the results is a time and mind suck which users like me will have no tolerance for. Thankfully, what they're doing is "only" as complex as driving searches with LLMs. And it probably doesn't even involve fine tuning, given that they're able to run new LLMs the same day they're released. I hope to soon be a happy customer of the natural open source replacement for this.

I use chat gpt to generate my google queries now and finally getting better results.

Are you serious? Can you give some examples?

That sounds cumbersome. And if that's your workflow, wouldn't a service like perplexity be a better fit for you?

yes but with the observation that it also interprets your query beforehand and searches based on the interpreted string. It has increased my google/fu ten-fold

Yes

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