I ditched Google for AI search alternatives like Perplexity and ChatGPT

Google Search recently celebrated its 26th anniversary. That has changed in this quarter century the place where you can find anything on the internet – you don’t look things up, you google it. It has become second nature to simply tap the Google search bar on your phone whenever a question pops into your head. But lately you may have noticed that your search experience has become too erratic, especially since the advent of generative AI.

Rest assured you’re not alone: ​​Google’s search results have indeed gotten worse. Google even recently added AI summaries as a stopgap, but it’s so unreliable as to be unusable. These types of things have increased in frequency in recent months. That’s why I’ve now turned to Google Search’s AI-first alternatives for my internet needs, and I have no desire to turn back.

I use Perplexity as my alternative to Google Search

It can do what Google does and more

Source: Pixabay

Many new AI companies have tried to reinvent search engines from the ground up – even the Arc browser has one built in – but Perplexity is by far the most popular of them all.

When you send Perplexity your search, it will look up some search results for you and display a brief summary. It’s especially useful if, for example, you need a step-by-step guide to something or a tasty gist of a complex topic. People even use it to get their morning news feed, with the ability to dive deeper into a story if there’s something you like.

My work as a technology reporter often requires me to consult many sources for my stories and scan long documents to find a single piece of relevant information. It has helped to significantly reduce the time required for such in-depth research. It can easily find things like user anecdotes from public forums beyond the most common (Reddit, Quora, etc.) and point me to the exact piece of text in an article I was looking for.

For example, Perplexity came in handy when discussing celebrity voices that Gemini should adopt; I could easily compare each celebrity’s voice quality to what I thought was their most distinguishing feature in terms of accuracy. Without this, if I wanted to check if Matthew McConaughey had another prominent accent, I would have to scan countless interviews and fan pages to find this obscure information.

That AI goodness is also useful for my personal curiosity. Once, while watching Family man, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what exactly happened when Peter Griffin lost his previous job. I told Perplexity the reason for my mental state, and it immediately gave me the exact answer I wanted. It only took a few seconds before I could move on with my life.

This search function is just one part of Perplexity that I use almost exclusively. It has a number of other focused modes specifically designed for things like math problems, academia, video searching, or social discussions. You can try these out for yourself to see how they fit into your workflow.

Source: Pexels

Bewilderment also has its problems

While Perplexity is for the most part integrated into my workflow, it’s hard to gloss over many of its shortcomings that relate both to its functionality and to the broader discussion around AI ethics. The AI ​​search engine was flagged not too long ago for its lack of clear citations, which has improved significantly since then. The search summary that Perplexity produces is now correctly linked to all its sources with in-line attributions.

Another, more prominent problem with Perplexity involves scraping internet data without the original publisher’s permission, sometimes even making paywalled content available for free. The AI ​​tool has also been accused of plagiarism in the AI-generated text. In response, the company has launched a publisher partnership program to share advertising revenue with outlets listed in search results.

ChatGPT sits between Google and Perplexity

The way I formulate my searches has changed forever

The Google search bar, squashed by Perplexity and ChatGPT on my phone’s home screen, perfectly illustrates how much importance it has lost in my life: 50%.

ChatGPT is not a search engine in the typical sense, mainly because its datasets are not always up to date and it does not routinely check the Internet before answering your questions (the parent company is working on its own AI search engine).

However, it may still be the best AI tool for general purposes, ranging from correcting my grammar in texts when I’m feeling lazy, to summarizing my freelance contracts to highlight every clause that’s giving me the short end of the stick.

I use Perplexity to get clear answers to my questions, while ChatGPT works more as my creative springboard. I chatted it up to come up with funny names for my friends’ WhatsApp group and sometimes brainstormed the central theme of a personal essay I’m writing.

For a pedantic person like me who wants that exact phrase in his writing but can’t remember it, ChatGPT is a godsend (I know how ironic it sounds). I can tell it what I want to convey and the jumble of words that are in my head, and it will deliver the exact sentence I was looking for in seconds. Try that with Google Search, and you’ll end up searching forums, dictionaries, and thesauruses to find what’s on the tip of your tongue.

This has had such an impact on me that it has completely changed the way I formulate questions. Instead of putting together a specific set of keywords with source codes like ‘Reddit’ to get the right results, I could just ask my question the same way I do here. Sure, it takes up more space than a quick Google Search query, but this way I can elaborate on exactly what I’m thinking about. And with AI, the more context you provide, the better the results.

Related

ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which Gives the Better Answers?

Gemini brings some much-needed competition to ChatGPT

Gemini is a mixed bag right now

Honestly, Gemini is by far the easiest chatbot to access on all the top Android phones. You can simply swipe up from the bottom corner to bring it forward. Yet it is my least used AI tool. Not only does Gemini still have to catch up to ChatGPT in day-to-day tasks, but its AI Overviews in Search has had far too many bugs to rely on compared to products designed from the ground up for AI.

I continue to rely on Google Search for all the factual information that’s still neatly in the knowledge graph, like finding the name of a movie’s director. And Google’s in-search dictionary is by far the fastest way I’ve found to look up synonyms. I even set up a custom search engine for this specific feature in my browser.

However, my dependence on Google Search has decreased quite a bit, with ChatGPT and Perplexity now handling the majority of my web searches. In an ideal world, I could combine all the different purposes into one reliable AI product, the results of which I could trust 100 percent without fact checking. But unfortunately the world we live in is far from that.