AI is kind of bad at searching the web right now anyway. I've found myself having to waste tokens forcing models to not do so just to achieve the results I actually want.
Perplexity is actually very good at web searches. I'm leaning on it more and more for technical queries because it saves substantial time vs Google and actually gets it right (as compared to ChatGPT 4o, which is wrong ~50% of the time in my queries).
I've had the opposite experience with things I already kinda know the answer to and just want to find the source. It's pretty much 50/50 if it selects a high quality source or some random website thats in the top results for whatever search query it cooks up.
ive been using perplexity more and more too. I respect those attribution/citation bubbles they give (1) (2) etc and click to them to get to the source with low friction.