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How to replace Google Search with Perplexity AI

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By Lloyd Coombes

Fed up with Google’s results? Perplexity could be just what you’re looking for

There’s no denying that Google has been a core part of the internet for decades (for better or for worse), but it’s also fair to say its search product is hardly at the peak of its powers anymore.

Clunky AI overviews that are often incorrect, too many sponsored results, and giving low-quality sites more of the limelight has left many scrambling for an alternative. Where it often felt like one would never come, now Perplexity AI offers a genuine rival.

Naturally, an AI search engine comes with the usual caveats: it’ll get some things wrong, but with the state of Google at the moment, there’s perhaps never been a better way to try something new.

With that in mind, here’s why Perplexity AI might be your next search engine of choice, and how to change it.

Why Perplexity AI could be your next search engine

The big draw of Perplexity AI as a search engine is that it’s not just a search engine. Let me explain — Google has piled more and more on top of its existing search product, and while some of it has undoubtedly been useful, it’s started to feel as though the whole thing is creaking.

In many ways, Perplexity AI’s search function is just a bonus to a very good LLM that’s pretty great at research.

You can Google when, say, the iPhone 17 is launching, but that’s it. After that, you start a fresh query, and the process begins again, whereas Perplexity lets you ask a follow-up question like “How many models will there be?” or “How many days is that?”.

It’s also great at doing, well, LLM things. Ask it for a summary of the news today, and it’ll condense it for you. Ask for a recipe for banana bread, and it’ll put its digital apron on, and even let you ask for potential replacements for ingredients you may not have in the house.

The whole thing is more conversational, and it’s remarkably easy to set up — even in Chrome, which has long been Google’s home turf.

How to make Perplexity AI your default search engine

The following instructions work on any Chromium browser, and some will let you log in on multiple profiles so you can flick between Google and Perplexity based on your context.

  • Open Chrome on your device
  • Click the three dots in the top-right corner, then click Settings.
  • On the left-hand sidebar, click Search engine, and then Manage search engines and site search
  • To add Perplexity to the browser, use the following information:
  • Click Add, then return to the list.
  • Typing the ‘perp’ shortcut will trigger Perplexity, but you can also set it as Default if you’d prefer.

Using Firefox? It’s just as simple.

  • Open Firefox on your device
  • Open the Firefox Add-Ons storefront and add the Search Engines Helper Extension
  • Open the extension, and then enter https://www.perplexity.ai/?q=%s for the Search URL, which will auto populate the rest of the list.
  • Right-click the address bar in your browser and click Add “perplexity.ai” and you’re done.

How to use Perplexity on your phone

Perplexity Ask screenshots(Image credit: Future / Perplexity)

 

Switching to Perplexity on your phone is as easy as installing the Perplexity Ask app.

Doing so gives you a sort of ‘live ticker’ of news before you even get started.

Perhaps my favourite thing about Perplexity is that it attempts to put sources front-and-center. Asking “what’s in the news today?” will give a series of stories, as well as tappable citations so you can expand a story.

Perplexity Ask screenshots(Image credit: Future / Perplexity)

There’s also a handy set of ‘Related’ options you can tap, with each expanding the context of the day’s biggest stories.

Paid subscribers can even get the news (or any other searches) delivered via audio recording.

Finally, I particularly appreciate the way you can quickly share a screenshot via a built-in share sheet — ideal for sharing fun or surprising results.

Will you be switching to Perplexity AI as your browser? Let us know, and don’t forget you can always switch back to Google if you’d prefer.

Feature Image credit: Perplexity

By Lloyd Coombes

Sourced from techradar

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OpenAI’s SearchGPT Could Mark the Beginning of the End to Google’s Search Dominance

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By Rachel Curry

SearchGPT is already dubbed by some as the “Google killer.”

Arvind Jain, a former Google (GOOGL) engineer and now CEO of the enterprise A.I. search platform Glean, never saw Google’s approximately 90 percent market share in online search as overtly anticompetitive—after all, Google always had a superior search product, Jain said. In recent years, however, innovation seems to have given way to profitability. “The experience was getting worse, especially on mobile devices, where there are just way too many ads on the page,” the former Googler told Observer.

For the first time in many years, competition is ramping up. In July, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, an A.I.-powered search engine that many already dubbed the “Google killer.” Smaller players, such as Perplexity AI, are also gaining momentum in the search space.

“There is more serious competition than ever before,” Ashwini Karandikar, executive vice president of media, technology and data at the American Association of Advertising Agencies, an industry group, told Observer. Karandikar’s prescience is rooted in decades of industry experience, during which she witnessed digital advertising go from just 5 percent of a company’s advertising budget to practically 100 percent.

Technologically, answer engines powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to shake up the search and digital advertising markets, but Jain doesn’t think they’re not yet commercially ready. “Personally, as a user, I don’t feel comfortable going to these answer engines,” he said. That’s because most of them don’t provide the source of information from which they generate answers. Some chatbots are starting to cite sources, but this feature is still in the early stages. Ultimately, competitors will have to lean into a hybridized search solution, said Jain, which will combine plain search and plain answers for an optimized user experience.

That need for transparency has roots in the trust gap highlighted by consumer-facing A.I. products. The A.I. trust gap is “the sum of the persistent risks (both real and perceived) associated with A.I.,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, a business professor at Tufts University, wrote in a recent article for the Harvard Business Review. Common concerns around A.I. include deepfakes, hallucinations, data privacy and A.I.’s inherent black-box problem. Last year, Pew Research found that 52 percent of Americans feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of A.I., with people particularly torn about its application for finding accurate information online.

To establish public trust, companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are all prioritizing self-regulation. These companies are on a steering committee for a truth-seeking organization called C2PA, or the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. It’s an “open technical standard providing publishers, creators and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media,” according to the coalition’s website.

Brand recognition will play a major role in trust, something Google simply has more of, said Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner. “People trust results because they see that they’re appearing on a search results page that they are familiar with,” he told Observer. “If you go to Perplexity, for example, as an alternative search engine, it has some powerful capabilities, but it doesn’t have that established brand trust yet that makes you feel confident that the results it’s giving you are unbiased and authentic.”

However, as the competitive landscape in search and digital advertising inevitably evolves, the leading position is not set in stone. Google is currently facing multiple antitrust charges over its dominance in the online search market. “Whatever happens with the trials, we’re definitely looking at a situation where marketers, in particular, are going to have to diversify their approach and do a lot more experimentation and testing of new channels, new techniques, new strategies for search and discovery,” said Frank, adding that this push forward is “mostly because of the impact of generative A.I.”

As new competitors enter the arena, monopoly concerns are not entirely assuaged. OpenAI itself is backed by Bing creator Microsoft. Meanwhile, Google is keeping up with A.I. trends with new products like AI Overviews. It’s possible the competitive waters will just get muddied. Nonetheless, innovation is already responding, and a somewhat consolidated market is good, said Frank. “We don’t want to see the same kind of fragmentation that made digital media so difficult to deal with in the early days,” he said.

Feature Image Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Rachel Curry

Sourced from Observer

 

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