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.
It has been a good run – 26 years – but Google has been losing its mojo for a while. It wasn’t Microsoft Bing, which is still an also-run in my book. No, Google has spent the last few years shooting itself in the foot.
It all started because Google has been slowly losing its ad dominance, from its high of 34.7 percent in 2017 to an estimated 28.8 percent in 2024, to rivals such as Amazon, with its product search, and TikTok with its in-service search functionality. It’s even beginning to look like Google may drop below 50 percent when it comes to web search-based ads.
So, to make up for its slowly shrinking market share, Google started injecting ads into its search results. The result? That once invaluable first page of search results is now overflowing with ads and wrong answers.
As writer Cory Doctorow put it so well, “Google, the poster-child for enshittification … has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90 percent of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.”
This wasn’t by mistake. It was by design. Ed Zitron, writer and CEO of EZPR claimed in his must-read essay, “The Man Who Killed Google Search,” that by putting ads over search results, “Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by CTO Prabhakar Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google [search] worse to make the company more money.” Good for Google in the short run. Bad for everyone else in the short and long run.
This wouldn’t have mattered so much if Google only had Bing and the like to worry about it. Unfortunately for Google, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT 3.0 arrived, and suddenly AI went from something that would matter Real Soon Now to the World Is Finally Changing.
Today, thanks to AI, Google has some more competition. While people like to compare Google’s AI-enabled search to ChatGPT and the like, most AI chatbots aren’t real competition. They give you answers, which are often still too bogus to be useful, and not search results.
That’s why Paul Buchheit, one of Gmail’s creators, tweeted in 2022 that “Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption.
He added: “AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money. Even if they [Google does] catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business.”
However, only when an AI engine gives you the sources of its answers as well as an answer, will Google search face a major threat. That alpha competitor is Perplexity.
Besides giving you what looks like an answer, Perplexity gives you the exact search results you need to see if the answer is right. Spoiler alert: AI answers are still wrong far too often for you to rely on. But, armed with the research Perplexity used to come up with those answers, you can work out the real answers.
That, my friends, is a killer app.
Unlike Google, with its ad-laden results, Perplexity offers a cleaner, more focused search experience. This not only improves the user experience but also enhances the accuracy of search results, as paid placements do not influence them.
Perplexity lets you use natural language to get search results and answers like all chatbots. If those aren’t good enough, the chatbot makes it easy to refine your query to get to the right sources and answers.
Yes, learning how to create successful queries is a skill in itself, but to really get results from Google, you still need to know your way around its underlying structure, syntax, and Boolean logic. Perplexity makes search much easier.
What I really love about Perplexity is that it provides links to verifiable sources alongside its responses. This enables me – and you – to fact-check and explore a topic more deeply.
This may not be the AI that can answer all your questions without thought that many people seem to want, but it’s the smart search engine I’ve been waiting for all my life.
Google? It will have its chance to make a comeback. If it doesn’t, well, remember when Yahoo was briefly what everyone used to navigate the web? Yahoo didn’t die the way AltaVista did, and neither will Google. But there are darn few people who go to Yahoo for their answers today, and Google may face a similar fate if it doesn’t get its act together. ®