AI Search Engine: Perplexity.ai

Perplexity.ai is a new AI-based search engine, here's what it has to say about Picklewix.com!

Glad to see picklewix.com is well indexed in Perplexity.ai's search results. One of my services is SEO for my clients to help them get found (SEO = search engine optimization) and I believe that all search engines are important. Especially new AI-driven search engines. I believe that Google has been an AI search engine for sometime now, so they're still the king of providing the BEST results, in my opinion. However, I'm always open to trying new search engines. I use Duck Duck Go, Bing, and other search engines often to compare results and trigger them to index new pages, but I always find myself defaulting to Google for serious searches as it truly provides the most accurate results to what I am searching. Google's AI is off the hook, and has been for some time. It indexes some of the new pages we create within hours with a little help from us. I think Google's search is the best AI search so far, even though we don't call it an AI search. And, Google seems to be getting more and more cluttered up with sponsored PPC ads these days, making it harder to find the real results. So time will tell if Perplexity or other search engines will take a turn in dominating the searching masses. With the web, you never know who will rise to the top over a short period of time. Remember MySpace? So while Google is the top so far, we'll see who becomes the king of search in 2024 and beyond!

Feb 6, 2024 Update: I've been using Perplexity.ai a lot in the last week, and I have to say, I like how it works more like a conversation about a topic. It provides answers to detailed questions, using references from sites across the web to compile a detailed response to answer the question. It's a way you can deep dive into a subject, getting more and more into the depth of the topic and read a lot of suggested questions.

For example, you can ask it gardening questions (one of my favorite topics to research on search engines):

I have found topics (such as regular people) that it can't find a lot of information on, and it says that, But you can ask about companies, for example, and it will provide a summary and multiple sources for where it found the information. For example, in the screenshots below I searched for "Is Sandia Seed a good seed company?" and it responded in the details below:

Like Google's "People also Ask" questions, Perplexity offers up related questions on the topic you search, here is once I selected to expand the related topic it suggested "how does sandia seed compare to other seed companies?" – and here is it's response:

You can also use Perplexity to TRY to find out how to contact some of the largest companies on earth, such as Facebook, by phone. But I guess Zuckerberg can't afford to offer phone support to his customers who are making him one of the richest people in the world.

At least Google has phone support for it's cash machine, Google Ads:

One bonus to Perplexity: No Ads! (yet?)

I do like the conversation style and followup questions that Perplexity allows – and, I find it's sources on par with Google's search results, except it fortunately does NOT have any ads cluttering up the first growing chunk of the results like you see in Google. But, as with all new platforms, I'm sure the ads or fees are to come to Perplexity, but will it become the next Google? Time will tell.