Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome
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Especially on Android - which is the most used OS in the world.
It seems strange to ban Google from offering a Search Engine, when all the other big tech companies can get into any field just fine, but the legal system is primarily a weapon for corruption these days, so who knows.
I mean, sure, if you want to start limiting what big companies do, and there's some fairness in how it's applied, fine.
But that's not what will happen.
MS literally forces Edge and Bing on users yet they'll seek out Google and Chrome.
In the EU, they're forced to ask you which browser and which search engine you want.
> It seems strange to ban Google from offering a Search Engine, when all the other big tech companies can get into any field just fine, but the legal system is primarily a weapon for corruption these days, so who knows.
Letting one instance of blatant anti competitive and anti consumer behaviour fly because others are allowed isn't the way to go. Google are a bit monopolistic abuser, fix that. Apple are too? Good, that's the next job.
> I mean, sure, if you want to start limiting what big companies do, and there's some fairness in how it's applied, fine.
> But that's not what will happen.
That's how the EU is approaching with the DMA and DSA.
It's almost as if people actually like Google's products.
If you're assuming the vast majority of European users don't use Chrome except when tricked by Google to game MAUs - it would show up in usage that the vast majority of European Android users are regularly using a different browser.
There's hardly a difference compared to RoW.
If anything, they may try to start from scratch, like with Fuschia. In which case the anti-trust was a success in making companies compete again.
The rules apply to everyone it's just that no one else has a search or browser monopoly
Microsoft had a browser monopoly at one point and it should have happened to them but they generously pissed it away
Perplexity already has a browser. At this point, this is complete desperation from them for attention.
OpenAi literally retired all their models to the anger of the likes of people like you because they know this is all basically a race for the most familiar consumer assistant on a monthly subscription.
Both Kagi and Perplexity are customers of Brave, btw. See https://brave.com/api or just ask if you have questions. Will answer what I can for anyone curious.
Yet most of my Perplexity queries have produced poor results. It always feels like they optimized for minimizing latency and producing output that feels good instead of doing actual research. Most of the time it feels like the same quality of results I'd get from skimming the top of the Google search page summaries if I didn't filter out the spammy site.
The product could be more useful if it spent several minutes researching, but that would defeat the wow factor that I'm sure their product managers are prioritizing.
It’s reduced my legacy search engine usage significantly.
Is there a better product? ChatGPT with web search enabled?
I guess Google’s AI is probably good, I just haven’t used Google in a while as I switched to DuckDuckGo.
Its deep research and Pro modes are great at synthesizing thorough briefings on complex topics too, to get up to speed on a new client or job responsibility for example.
It's not a chatbot for me, it's a brilliant, tireless little research minion.
As always with any LLM you should double-check its final, specific answers. It does occasionally hallucinate when information simply isn't available. Your research minion is just that - a minion, you have to have the context. It's not a teacher or guru.
EDIT: the bottom line is, it came along at exactly the right time for me. Google's search results are pages of ads, and DuckDuckGo insists on showing page after page of content-farm blogspam for the types of topics I search for. It cuts right through all that crap for me.
It also sometimes completely botches it when information is available. For example a while back someone cited Musk only scoring 730 on the math SAT as evidence that there is something from with the test.
I looked up Musk's age to figure out about when he would have taken the SAT then asked Perplexity what percentile a 760 would have been then. It gave me an answer that as far as I can tell was right (~90th).
I then wondered what my percentile was, so asked it what percentile 790 would have been when I took it. It told me it would have been 17.something, where that something had 5 digits.
That was obviously completely wrong because (1) there is no possible way it could have data that would justify giving an answer with 5 digits after the decimal point, and (2) the maximum possible score was 800 and scores were a multiple of 10, so for 790 to have been 17th percentile would mean that 83% of people who took the test scored a perfect 800.
I told it that this was clearly absurd.
It responded that I was completely right and said it was going to try again. On the retry it gave a reasonable answer that I knew from what I remembered was in the right ballpark and not given to ridiculous accuracy.
Each page has paragraphs and paragraphs of pure filler. Let the AI crawlers read them so I don’t have to.
I can also ask it to just reference research papers and it will find relevant data relating to my query from peer reviewed sources.
I think the sweet spot for AI results is around 10-30 seconds. It's fast enough that I'm willing to wait for the results even if I'm not sure I'm exploring the right topic. And it's also fast enough that even if I knew what to search for, it can give me summarized results faster than I could read on my own.
Even during ChatGPT peak, when HN was buzzing with every other post being how ChatGPT/other LLM product replaced Google for them, I could not honestly switch, or meaningfully reduce my Google usage.
Until Perplexity.
It was the AI product that actually reduced my Google usage. Even with AI mode directly built into Google homepage now, Perplexity is still better.
It has basically zero hallucination, each para/entry backed by a URL, and lower latentcy than any other LLM product.
I don't know why you find it bad. I use it daily, and for serious searches.
It has fundamentally changed the way I search the web/ask questions in the web.
Answers irrespective
Don't make using your product annoying.
Ever since deep thinking came out
It's not a profitable business to be in, and Perplexity would just do the exact same thing that might force Google to sell Chrome.
The only companies that should be allowed to buy Chrome are non-profits and companies promising to sell it for a fee (preferably not a subscription).
I am not sure if a single fee works. Browsers are too important and hard to maintain. What if people had paid single fee for Chrome 15 years ago for non-profit?
We want more browser engines, and slowing down development, e.g. to yearly, every two, or every three year for major releases would go a long way to ensure that.
Maybe you forget why we want more browser engines? It is not that we want the same standards rewritten differently. We want more competition, so that we get new ideas and alternatives. Maybe others don't have to catch up, since some standards or practices are currently dictated by Google and not seen as good in general.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...
This isn't a serious offer, its a publicity stunt. Google would effectively own the entire company short of some mind blowing multiple expansion here.
Watch for Perplexity to be raising money in the next 6 months. But given this stunt it looks like they think their growth is over and they've peaked as a company.
I wonder if they've thought about what it'll cost to keep Chrome dominant as a platform including the effort that goes into securing it on an ongoing basis!
On one hand, people don't like Google owning chrome as they have a huge influence on open web and they're essentially an ad company
On the other hand, if in the hands of an AI company, this could mean using your data for models, VC incentives, less open in general. Perplexity doesn't have a money printing machine to forever subsidize a browser.
It'll be interesting which narrative wins out.
Why buy Chrome anyway? Put that $34.5 billion into a team that forks and develops Chromium. Ban Google from developing browsers as well as paying for search preference in other browsers.
But I also haven’t used Google in years (I switched to other search engines) so their AI might be just as good.
Perplexity also has overlap with ChatGPT’s web search, but Perplexity is faster for me.
You get several models you can use (albeit they're not quite as powerful as their branded versions directly). you can setup projects and most other features you come to expect.
They do a good job with search though which is kind of their core value prop. They summarize well, cite sources, and have largely been pretty accurate with their findings. Being able to start a research task and provide more info and context while it is running is nice too for that "oh, I forgot about this!" moment.
With the pro sub you also get $5 in api credits a month so there's that.
Until Perplexity.
It was the AI product that actually reduced my Google usage. Even with AI mode directly built into Google homepage now, Perplexity is still better.
It has basically zero hallucination, each para/entry backed by a URL, and lower latentcy than any other LLM product.
I don't know why you find it bad. I use it daily, and for serious searches.
It has fundamentally changed the way I search the web/ask questions in the web. One particular way: I can now combine multiple subsequent searches into one. And I can trust the results.
I have Pro Claude plan, so I use that for deeper research. Not sure there's much difference now that Claude has web search. Perp is slightly more terse and also doesn't expend my tokens for Claude code
Anyone can fork a browser (and many unqualified or underfunded teams do), but acquiring control of the primary surface for Internet access of nearly half the planet? $34.5B seems pretty cheap.
I had for quite some time only relied on o3 pro for every query and it always defaulted to web search so hallucination rate was (seemingly) very low.
Now I'm using Claude more and he (it?) needs to be reminded that it he has a web saerch tool but other than that it works great.
Also they do not have anywhere close to having the money or stock value to buy it. So this is just for attention grabbing for the headlines.
Move along now, nothing to see here.
Imagine a browser (or any tech) that delivers seamless and undisclosed advertising and narrative through conversational interface. Why wouldn't that be an endgame of LLMs?
get the money, then turn around and release chromium by Google.
What money? Perplexity's latest valuation is ~18 billion USD.
Maybe Gamestop, PeTA, or Roblox should make an offer next.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/trump-ai-truth-search-per...
Whoever owns Chrome decides exactly what software most users run for web browsing, decides future web standards in practice, decides which kinds of extensions most users can use, decides the limits and carve-outs of adblockers, codecs and web features, has all the telemetry, and in future decides what AI-driven "presentational" modifications to web pages will be done, and what semantic scraping and uploading will happen automatically in the browser.
That would depend on the contract.
For $34.5B, I would expect the contract to say Google agrees to continue pre-installing Chrome on Chromebooks and Android for many years, with financial penalties if they don't.
Yeah, I'm sure that Perplexity would only have noble ideas in mind if the acquire a piece of software that is installed on >60% of the web-browsing population and automatically updates in the background.