What the Tech? New Search Engine “Perplexity”

Jamey Tucker KAALTV

(ABC 6 News) – Can you believe that Google is 25 years old? For the last quarter of a century, it’s given us just what we need when we need information quickly.

When you search for something online, you probably use Google. It’s the number one search
engine in the world by far, with more than 80% of all internet searches done through it. But
there’s a new search engine getting a lot of attention, and a billion dollars in investments. Could
it be a Google killer?

Perplexity is a search engine that uses AI to return search results like a human. It uses multiple
language models to find the results you want.

I won’t go into detail about LLM or (Large Language Models) but just a bit here for better
understanding. LLMs are programs that take information it finds from various websites, articles,
and other sources and understands them in the context of a human being. And each Large
Language Model is designed to do one thing or another really well.

  • Chat GPT-4 is one language model which excels in creative and technical writing.
  • Falcon is good for high-quality training data.
  • Claude 3 is used in applications like customer chats, data extraction, and complex tasks.
  • LLaMA 2 is strong in research.

Perplexity uses those LLMs and others to deliver fast results in a human-like language.

So you can search for something like you would ask a person. For example, “Why is it hot in
the summer and cold in the winter?” Perplexity searches the internet using those languages and
returns an answer, just like if you asked a super smart person to explain it.
It’s pretty interesting to see it in action as it combs the internet and resources.

How is Perplexity different from Google?

Google search gives you millions of search results in just a few seconds. Sometimes you don’t
need a million results. You need just the one that helps the most and in a language you
understand. Perplexity claims to do just that.

When you search the same question in Google, you’ll get answers, but mostly links to websites
and articles. Perplexity, on the other hand, explains the answer to your search and cites a few
websites, including related discussions on Reddit.

What are the benefits of using Perplexity?

I used Perplexity to search a myriad of questions, from help buying an electric guitar to the best
cooking oils. Each time, the results were easy to understand and provided me with the
information I needed.

The paid version of Perplexity finds or creates images to go along with the results, and rewrites
the content, adds artwork, and your name and photo for a blog post. Like most other AI
programs offering premium versions, Perplexity Premium is $20/month.

Is Perplexity a Google killer?

Perplexity may not be a Google killer, but in some situations, it’s a lot easier to quickly get the
results you’re looking for in concise words that don’t require you to click any external links. You
might want to give it a try.

Important Note:

It’s important to remember that no AI search engine is guaranteed to return 100% accurate
information.

Like other AI platforms, Perplexity has come under fire for copying articles it finds online and
returning them as search results with no citations. Perplexity and other AI platforms are still in
their early stages.