Opinion: Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine | Hacker News Reader

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

theregister.com

36 pointsrntn46 comments

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.

Have you tried Kagi? I’ve set all my devices to use it, and I’m at the point where I get annoyed when something goes to Google by mistake and I see crappy results. Kagi just gives much better results.

Did you try any of your queries using Perplexity Pro? (even at the free tier they give you a few 'Pro' queries a day) While it's still far from perfect, the Pro answers are generally higher quality than the free ones.

I'm finding several of the LLM's that can cite sources, including Perplexity, are more useful to me than Google for search these days. The notable exception is Gemini which has been quite bad in my experience compared to the other options.

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.

Append a ? to a Kagi search and you get the best of both worlds: it'll add LLM results (Claude at the moment) to a box at the top of your search. I think it's some sort of RAG model that they built on top of their search engine.

You can try the LLM half of it here without an account:

https://kagi.com/fastgpt

edit: I tried the perplexity link in the article. For my test query, the text it generated was similar, but it didn't cite any websites to back up its claims. That's useless! I thought having the LLM link to sources was already table stakes.

> kagi ... fastgpt

I asked a speculative question to FastGPT@Kagi and it returned a "Dunno" as the three Wikipedia pages it suggests having checked did not contain an obvious reply.

I asked the same to Perplexity and it returned a plausible speculative logical reply with more credible reference links.

There is a strong difference between "looking for documents" and "asking sensible questions".

FastGPT@Kagi could neither reply to the question nor find web pages that could be interesting to extrapolate the answer.

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.

That seems like a good litmus test question since it has a single correct answer, but a lot of potentially incorrect ones which sound like they might be right (North America has a lot of Hamiltons after all).

I ran the same query, and the first source is: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Places_named_aft...

I ran it through Perplexity Pro which gave a very different and detailed answer with this closing note: "It's worth noting that not all places named "Hamilton" are necessarily named after Alexander Hamilton. For example, Hamilton, Ontario in Canada is named after George Hamilton, a Canadian merchant. Similarly, Hamilton in Scotland and New Zealand are named after different individuals."

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.

you're describing Kagi

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).

I mentioned Kagi in another response, but I love having test queries in these search engine threads. Appending ? to your kagi search will add LLM results like these:

https://kagi.com/fastgpt?query=RFC+793

For me that gives a link to 793, a newer related RFC that wikipedia mentions, and a draft attempted replacement from 2021. (So, three links to standards and one to wikipedia.)

> How can you trust something like this

You could mistrust it since it is based on an uncorrected hallucinating technology, but use it either in contexts in which it is either very difficult to hallucinate, or just to return link to sources containing the sought information - as a search engine.

> how do I get it to return documents

Ask it to provide the link to said document, in literal natural language terms - "provide a link to document D123" -, and it will provide the link in a concise NL sentence as the direct output, plus related links in the "references" section.

> Ask it to provide the link to said document, in literal natural language terms - "provide a link to document D123" -, and it will provide the link in a concise NL sentence as the direct output

I dislike this style of "searching", but it does appear to work. I asked "provide a link to the HTML version of RFC 793" and got back the following URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc793[3. The URL is invalid (for some reason the reference became part of the URL), but it was easily fixable.

> I dislike this style of "searching"

That's because you are using a tool that is not made to be a search engine interface: there is no "type keywords here to get links to web pages". The field is "what would you reply to this" - very much not the same.

If you shouted "RFC 1234" or "Declaration of Independence" or "Walt Withman collected page 3" to a guy in the street, he would not reply with a reference to find the documents, directions as if you shouted "Fifth street towards the end" (and even then).

Perplexity is there to give you the references on which it decided to build the reply.

> The URL is invalid

The one I received was perfect. Stochastics.

> the reference became part of the URL

Given the format of the return you pasted, it looks more like the NN encoded a figment merging the URL and a "footnote anchor". It may or may not be so, but we could keep the suspect of that class of possibilities alive.

I just did the same search, and it literally said "Sources" with seven different links to the RFC and related documentation.

I repeated my search just now and got the following list of sources:

- https://www.arc-it.net/html/standards/standard1117.html

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WH1Z8htjMo

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cG-GDpMA4k

- https://www.tech-invite.com/y05/tinv-ietf-rfc-0793.html

- https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~eoin/index/isi_793rfc81.html

This list is different from my previous search yesterday, so I don't doubt that in your case you got different sources than me. It does look like the sources include mirrors of the RFC hosted by arc-it.net and tech-invite.com. I do not recognize these domains and would much prefer to see an ietf.org domain instead (which is also the first Google result in my case).

Stop using generative AI as a search engine[0]

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

Maybe just use LLMs as a "search engine", strictly: use natural language to get references to pages, then go check the pages.

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.

> They seem to be fairly unobtrusive, though, and they are labeled as such. For now, at least.

This was one of main selling points of Google Search 20-something years ago. Innocent text-only context-relevant ads on the side of the page. How times have changed...

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)

And to clarify I think AI has its place in search. Use it to filter the results that are shown to the users! Or give a reliability score to the user. Those are good uses. But don't invent information

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.

I don't see where in settings I can change this?

Is this an advertorial?

Certainly seems like it. I hope the mods remove it

> Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it! Steven is an advisor to Cathey Communications, a PR company which represents CIQ, a FOSS company that work on behalf of Rocky Linux

> Opinion: Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many. // Back in the 1970s, when this columnist was a happy teenage graduate student, I started my first business: Researchers at Large. I was one of the first people to make a living by being able to get answers from early search tools such as OCLC, NASA/Recon, and Dialog. Later, I used the early internet search services like Gopher, Archie, and WAIS. Then, I became one of the first users of search engines including AltaVista, WebCrawler, and Lycos. When Google came along in 1998 to topple all the other services, I'd used search services for decades. // What all this means is I know how to search about as well as anyone on the planet. This is why I must tell you that Google is losing its spot as the top search engine

> Is this

Maybe it's just an educated opinion - like the capital red letters literally say, an "I may be wrong but".

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.

Many of the LLM powered engines seem to be requiring a login these days. Just set up a burner gmail account to sign up for them (see, Google's still good for something ;-)

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...

> this whole "Google sucks" narrative is (IMHO) completely manufactured by those pushing another product

Strongly disagree. I use Kagi and immediately notice how crappy Google is any time I end up there (e.g. on somebody else’s device).

Serious question: for what searches?

In any of these "Google sucks" claims I've yet to see any definitive search results of Google compared to anything else where the alternative was clearly better. In fact, I rarely see any examples at all. It's all just feelings and vibes.

I've literally been hearing this for years at this point. DDG was the popular kid on HN for awhile and, even then, if you dug into the claims it would usually come down to "I don't use !g that often".

I don't have any concrete examples. But I will say that I have literally never used !g with Kagi or felt any inclination to.

I agree about prior engines. I tried DDG for a short period but it felt like junk, and same for Bing. With Bing in particular I'd search and search and not find something I knew was out there.

For me, just comparing Google to Google of 10 years ago it's very clear that Google is terrible now. I haven't found a viable alternative though. Kagi was Ok, but nothing seems as good as Google was 10 years ago.

I used Kagi enough to pay for it and I don't like that concept. I thinking having ads in search is completely reasonable, just label them as such and don't cater to ads at the cost of my search terms. I think thought if I'm searching for something and the ad is relevant it's fine to show it and can even help me find out about new products.

But Google is engineered to give you bad results so you do more searches and are more likely to click on an ad.

> But Google is engineered to give you bad results so you do more searches and are more likely to click on an ad.

Citation needed.

I do not believe Google would be a sustainable search business if people were routinely given bad results to keep searching.

What concrete examples can you give of what you consider "bad" search results? I'm genuinely curious.

Second, this whole "Google sucks" narrative is (IMHO) completely manufactured by those pushing another product or those with clickbait-y titles to opinion pieces.

Not that chatbots are the answer, but: if you think Google is still worth a damn, submit your next query to both Bing and Google and see what gives you more actionable results. Never mind Kagi or DDG or whatever people are pushing lately, just try plain old dumb Bing. It will beat Google like a rented mule.

Search is no longer job #1 at Google these days, and it shows. They lived long enough to become one of the crappy search engines they replaced.

I've seen these claims for years at this point but I never see concrete examples. It's all just vibes.

Part of the problem I think is that people have decided that if they see any ad, it's a bad search. That's my working theory anyway.

As an example, I just searched "How to fix a leaky faucet" across multiple search engines and on Google (both logged in and fresh and without ad blockers) and on Google I pretty much consistently get:

- Home Depot link

- People also ask...

- List of videos on the subject

- Lowe's link

- This Old House link

- Discussion and forums

Now, I half expected there to be ads for plumbers in my area on this page. That, to me, would be a completely legitimate ad in addition to organic search results.

After years, I've yet to see any of these claims that go anything beyond "vibes".

And the non-Google engines can't even begin to solve use cases that I find central to my search experience, because the Google results are based on user signals that the other engines are incapable of processing, even when I am logged in.

For example "When is the bus coming" does what I want on Google, does nothing of value elsewhere.

I've seen these claims for years at this point but I never see concrete examples. It's all just vibes.

Admittedly you're searching for very different things than what I search for. Lately, whenever I need things like electronic app notes and data sheets, Bing has been returning useful results on the front page that don't show up in Google at all. There is no shortage of unattributed, misleading and/or wrong snippets mixed in with the Google results, though.

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

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