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Comment by breadwinner | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't anyone mentioned https://www.perplexity.ai yet? I am blown away by its accurate answers. The main difference between ChatGPT and Perplexity is that in addition to better answers it also gives you links to the source. Tools like Perplexity will turn Google into Altavista in the next 2 to 3 years.

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> Tools like Perplexity will turn Google into Altavista in the next 2 to 3 years

No it won't.

a) Google has a dominant advantage in raw data. Map POIs from their decade long investment in data quality and breadth. Shopping that has direct integration from almost all ecommerce stores. And a real-time crawling infrastructure where their index is constantly updated. Perplexity, Claude etc are dealing with typically year old information making it useless for many searches.

b) Google is a business. It runs the world's most successful and sophisticated ads platform that exists today. Advertisers demand micro-targeting, high volume and very high ROAS. Those that have tried to replicate this e.g. Reddit, X, Pinterest have all failed miserably. Which is why they are treated as purely brand awareness platforms. Nice to have not a must have. So will see how long Perplexity survives once its VC money dries up.

Nothing like rebutting a black and white assertion with a black and white assertion

Google still being dominant in 2-3 years is far more plausible than not.

just in the last week I've managed to break myself of the muscle-memory of reaching for Google to answer random questions that pop up in my daily life, in favor of LLM. About 90% of the time the LLM satisfies my query on the first try, 98% of the time by the second or third. With the enormous benefit of no ads

It is black or white: either Google exists in a decade or it doesn't.

I would much rather take the bet that Perplexity doesn't exist.

Also Google also have AI answers which are ok if not the same as Perplexity's. Plus they invented transformers and the like.

OpenAI launched SearchGPT via waitlist recently which does the same thing as Perplexity. I don’t use the latter so I don’t know how it compares but the OpenAI version been working fine for me. Kagi has also had similar functionality for a while too, which works with their Lens feature and has a fast mode if you add a question mark to the end of a regular search query.

It’s not much of a competitive moat compared to having the model itself.

I did some side by sides and repeated perplexity queries to SearchGPT when I got access about a week ago and I thought SearchGPT was a lot worse, in some cases just plainly misunderstanding a question or surfacing the wrong info. Just my anecdotal data, but feels about right for its beta status. Assumably Perplexity must have a little bit of secret sauce that OpenAI has to figure out.

Kagi doesn't really have a similar function. The Kagi GPT feature only reads a small snippet of the web results, while Perplexity gets a large excerpt of the actual web site. I've tested this by having the AI read back to me the prompt given to it it used to answer the question.

I agree with you that Google is effectively dead in the water, unless they successfully do something drastic. But they’ll be in the water for a long time yet. Yahoo is still the world’s ~5th biggest website and it has been dead in the water for 20-25 years.

Did someone say e-barnacles ?

Every time I ask for cafe recommendations, half of its suggestions are listed as "permanently closed" on Google Maps :/

At least you get recommendations that aren't just SEO-optimized adsites

Not at all clear to me that AI models can do search-like functions cheaply enough to outcompete Google (in the very near future). Yes, quality is amazing. But cost per search needs to be very low.

But does it? Google has gotten drunk on their ad margins. I struggle to believe someone can’t displace them if they’ve got better technology and are willing to be more aggressive on margin profile.

Thing is that LLM generated word salad is destroying Google search.

Assuming that Perplexity doesn’t operate its own search engine and crawler, how would it be able to operate without Google?

Google’s search index and its maintenance will remain a required functionality for the internet, and it will have to be paid for one way or another. Furthermore, AI will continue to require a corresponding search interface to implement its AI search on top of, and some portion of human users will also still want to directly access it, rather than only through an AI front end.

Easy, just use Bing.

It is a joke but we really have only 2 search engines to choose from, i don't know what to think about it...

Quick litmus test shows that this AI prefers an anti western conservative stance over neutrality.

> disprove christianity

Gives 5 sections: Burden of Proof, Scientific and Historical Challenges, Philosophical Arguments, Reliability of Scripture, Personal Experience

> disprove islam

>> I apologize, but I do not feel comfortable attempting to disprove or criticize any religion. Matters of faith are deeply personal, (...)

Results may differ if you don't use separate incognito tabs.

Doesn't that just depend on what LLM you happen to be using? And doesn't Perplexity support many different LLMs?

Sure, but anything built with "Safety" in mind is going to react this way. I guess "and more" means Mi{s,x}tral, which is happy to criticize islam while Clauda and Llama refuse.

"Select your preferred AI Model. Choose from GPT-4o, Claude-3, Sonar Large (LLama 3.1), and more"

https://www.perplexity.ai/pro

Edit: looks like perplexity deprecated/dropped mistral and recommends using llama instead, effective 8/12/24:

https://docs.perplexity.ai/changelog/changelog#model-depreca...

No shit. Are you surprised?

I think this also has to do with most Western religions being much less strict. Islamic followers tend to follow all their rules pretty Stichting strictly (eg no alcohol, no pork, going to the mosque). Whereas in Western Christian religions things are pretty relaxed, except for some splinter groups. When I lived in Ireland my ex's family was pretty devout Catholic and they they didn't care about us living together unmarried.

The same goes with the attitude to questioning religion. Nobody cares about "blasphemy" in the West but in Islamic countries it's a pretty big thing.

I think this has its effect on LLMs as of course they are trained on real world conversations and writings.

ChatGPT gives you links to online sources for nearly a year now.

Some of which are entirely hallucinated, tbf, especially if you're asking for academic references

I've never seen a hallucinated link. You might be thinking of academic citations, but actual links from performing an online search are always valid.

I've gotten links that did not match what was mentioned right before them. Like it would hallucinate some article and provide a doi link that took me to something else, often entirely unrelated

On this topic. I get output that looks like url links with sources.. but the hyperlinks are not clickable.

No right click. Left click. Shift + click

What gives?

Same but if you click the copy icon you can get the url

smdh

Not with every reply, and when it does give a link it is often 404.

the problem is, unlike with altavista and google, we still have a lot of use cases where we aren't asking questions. I just want sites that contain keywords.

I'd even say that part of the problem with modern search is answering questions instead of matching keywords and getting rid of junk and spam.

That's just RAG.

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