What is Perplexity AI?
Taking into account its most basic function, Perplexity AI is an online platform where users can type questions in a box and get answers by pressing the “enter” button.
My experiment with Perplexity AI
Since I didn’t want to ask Perplexity AI anything in particular, I just typed the word “marketing”, pressed “enter”, and waited to see what results would come up.
The results that I got were very different to the search results that I have got used to getting through Google.
First of all, there was not any indexing of information sources.
For example, Google provides ten results per page.
This, however, is not the case with Perplexity.
Regarding my query about marketing, what you get on the website of Perplexity AI is a fully-fledged article about marketing that combines information from various sources.
This can be done through artificial intelligence, natural language, machine learning, and similar applications, methods, and technologies.
While the search engine of Google gives a user access to a big amount of relevant sources of information by displaying the title of the source, a snippet of it, and a link to it, in order for the user to decide on how he or she can make best use of and mix those sources, Perplexity AI literally does this job for the user.
However, this caused me to have some doubts and concerns .
The article about marketing that was provided by Perplexity AI included links to the sources used, similarly to how citations are used in an academic paper.
When I checked those citations, I realized that, for example, Perplexity had only changed a verb in a sentence of the new article, which added no originality to the new article.
In some other sentences, the content that was taken from various sources was too vague.
When I used Google’s search operators to check whether the article’s content could be found elsewhere on the web, I discovered that half sentences were exact matches of sentences found in other posts available online.
In other words, what all of these artificial intelligence, natural language, and machine learning applications actually did was to make up sentences from an infinite number of online sources, so these sentences seemingly made sense, just like matching the different pieces of a puzzle.
To me, this is similar to using a few words from one song, some lyrics from some other song, half a verse from another song, and so on, in order to mix them up in a new song that seems to make perfect sense, bears no resemblance with the sources used, and qualifies as original.
However, a question that remains to be answered is whether such content is actually original.
Google has been accused of “stealing” others’ content, in order to be able to compose its search engine results, even if it only displayed snippets from other sources on the pages of its search engine results.
What would those who placed blame on Google for doing that have to say on Perplexity’s approach?
Another issue that needs further thought is the fact that, so far, content providers, bloggers, news sources, and literally every small player who writes and posts content online has been critical of Google’s search engine algorithm and its frequent changes, because, although Google provides literally zillions of search engine results about a popular query, it’s only the first page of search engine results that actually counts, and even then, it’s only worth it if you can rank at the top of that first page.
If the search engine of Perplexity AI was to outperform that of Google among users, what would those small-time online content providers (with bigger players also being affected) have to say on Perplexity’s approach to only displaying a handful of information sources on its page?
OK, the majority of Internet users are in favor of promoting new technologies.
However, based on how the Perplexity AI search engine currently works, if it becomes the Google of the future, small content providers who already get very little traffic from Google, they will not get any traffic at all from Perplexity, and this could put the final nail in the coffin for them.
Sources and further reading:
10 Things to know on Perplexity AI, a new competitor of Google
Originally published by me n vocal.media