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

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/opinion_column_perplexity_vs_google/

by rntn • 2 years ago

36 46 2 years ago

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.

D13Fd3• 2 years ago

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.

blihp3• 2 years ago

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.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

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

tikkun• 2 years ago

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.

boromi• 2 years ago

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

tokai• 2 years ago

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.

dingnuts2• 2 years ago

you're describing Kagi

dingnuts2• 2 years ago

Stop using generative AI as a search engine[0]

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

mdp20215• 2 years ago

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

samuell• 2 years ago

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/

bramhaag3• 2 years ago

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).

hedora2• 2 years ago

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.)

mdp20215• 2 years ago

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.

bramhaag3• 2 years ago

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.

CrankyBear2• 2 years ago

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

bramhaag3• 2 years ago

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).

kunwon1• 2 years ago

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.

throwaway494932• 2 years ago

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...

jmyeet4• 2 years ago

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...

D13Fd3• 2 years ago

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).

jmyeet4• 2 years ago

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".

hattmall• 2 years ago

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.

jmyeet4• 2 years ago

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.

CamperBob22• 2 years ago

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.

jmyeet4• 2 years ago

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".

marban• 2 years ago

Is this an advertorial?

PunchTornado• 2 years ago

Certainly seems like it. I hope the mods remove it

mdp20215• 2 years ago

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".

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

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.

aeldidi• 2 years ago

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).

CrankyBear2• 2 years ago

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

blihp3• 2 years ago

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."

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

How can any search engine be good now that Google has given us a world of SEO spam through their advertising business?

gonzalohm2• 2 years ago

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)

gonzalohm2• 2 years ago

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

crystal_revenge• 2 years ago

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.

hedora2• 2 years ago

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.

mdp20215• 2 years ago

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.

mukunda_johnson• 2 years ago

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.

blihp3• 2 years ago

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 ;-)

bambax• 2 years ago

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.

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

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