Google Search recently celebrated its 26th anniversary. Over the past quarter century, the Internet has transformed into a place to find just about anything on the Internet. Instead of looking something up, you Google it. I’ve gotten into the habit of tapping the Google search bar on my phone as soon as a question pops into my head. But lately, you’ve probably noticed that the search experience has become too unstable, especially since the advent of generative AI.
Rest assured you are not alone. Google search results are actually getting worse. Google recently added AI Overview as a stopgap solution, but it’s so unreliable that it can’t be used. As all of this has built up over the past few months, I’ve now come to rely on AI-first alternatives to Google Search for my internet needs, and I have no intention of looking back.
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Use Perplexity as an alternative to Google Search
Do the same things as Google and more
Source: Pixabay
Many new-age AI companies are trying to reinvent the search engine from scratch (the Arc browser even has a search engine built in), but Perplexity is the most popular of them.
When you submit a query to Perplexity, it retrieves a large number of search results and displays a quick summary. For example, it’s especially useful if you need a step-by-step guide to getting something done, or a convincing gist on a complex subject. People also use it to get a digest of the morning news, and can dig deeper into an article if something interests them.
In my job as a technology reporter, I often refer to many resources to write a story or read through long documents to find a single piece of relevant information. It helped greatly reduce the time required for such detailed research. I can easily find things like user anecdotes from public forums outside of the most popular forums (Reddit, Quora, etc.) and point me to the exact text part of the article I was looking for.
For example, Perplexity was helpful when discussing which celebrity voices Gemini should employ. It was easy to accurately compare each celebrity’s voice quality to the voice quality that seemed most distinctive. Otherwise, if you need to see if Matthew McConaughey has another notable accent, you’ll have to sift through tons of interviews and fan pages to find this obscure information.
The beauty of AI also lends itself to my personal curiosity. I was watching Family Guy once, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what exactly happened when Peter Griffin lost his last job. When I told Perplexity the reason for my mental predicament, I immediately received exactly the answer I wanted. There was only a few seconds of confusion and I was able to move on with my life.
This search feature is just one part of Perplexity that I use almost exclusively. There are many other focused modes designed specifically for math problems, academics, video searches, social discussions, and more. Try these out for yourself and see how they fit into your workflow.
Source: Pexels
Confusion also has its problems
Although Perplexity is integrated into a large part of my workflow, it’s hard to ignore its many flaws related to both its functionality and the larger conversation around AI ethics. The AI search engine was criticized a while ago for its lack of clear citations, but has since improved significantly. Perplexity-generated search summaries are now properly linked to all sources using inline attributes.
Another, more prominent problem with Perplexity is that it scrapes internet data without the consent of the original publisher, and in some cases makes paywalled content available for free. The AI tool has also been accused of plagiarizing AI-generated text. In response, the company launched a publisher partnership program to share advertising revenue with media that appears in search results.
ChatGPT sits between Google and Perplexity
The way you express search queries has completely changed
The Google search bar squashed by Perplexity and ChatGPT on my phone’s home screen shows exactly how much importance it has lost in my life (50%).
ChatGPT is not a search engine in the typical sense. The main reason is that its datasets aren’t always up-to-date and it doesn’t check the internet by default before answering your questions (its parent company is developing its own AI search engine).
But it’s probably the best general-purpose AI tool for everything from correcting the grammar of a sentence when you’re feeling lazy to summarizing a freelance contract to highlight the clauses that put you in a tight spot. There is no difference.
While you use Perplexity to get direct answers to your queries, ChatGPT acts as a creative bounce board. I chatted with it to come up with funny names for my friends’ WhatsApp groups, and sometimes I brainstormed to identify a central theme for a personal essay I was writing.
For someone like me who is pedantic and wants that exact wording in my writing but can’t remember, ChatGPT is a godsend (I know that sounds sarcastic). I tell it what I want to say or the jumble of words I have in my head, and within seconds it shows me the exact phrase I was looking for. If you try this with a Google search, you’ll end up combing through forums, dictionaries, and thesauruses to find what interests you.
This had a big impact on me and completely changed the way I frame questions. Instead of combining a specific keyword string appended with a source identifier such as “Reddit” to get the correct result, you can ask the question in the same way as we are talking about here. Sure, it takes up more space than a short Google search query, but it allows you to spell out exactly what you’re thinking. With AI, the more context you provide, the better the results.
Related ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which Gives a Better Answer?
Gemini brings much-needed competition to ChatGPT
Gemini is currently in a different situation
Frankly speaking, Gemini is the easiest chatbot to access on top-of-the-line Android smartphones. Simply swipe up from the bottom corner to summon the chatbot. But this is my least used AI tool. Not only has Gemini still not caught up to ChatGPT in its day-to-day operations, but its AI overview in search has too many failures to rely on compared to products designed from the ground up for AI.
I continue to rely on Google search for factual information that is neatly placed in the knowledge graph, such as finding the name of a movie’s director. And Google’s Search-in-Dictionary is by far the fastest way I’ve found to search for synonyms. I have a custom search engine set up for this particular feature in my browser.
However, the reliance on Google search has decreased considerably, with ChatGPT and Perplexity now handling the majority of web queries. In an ideal world, we would be able to integrate all of our various purposes into one reliable AI product, and we would be able to trust its results 100% without fact-checking. But unfortunately, the world we live in is far from that.
