Perplexity, Ads, and SUVs

    [cat:weblinks]
    June 27th, 2023

      Follow-up: [I want to buy a new SUV which brand is best?].

      I don’t think ads[1] are necessarily wrong to have in search results (despite the misgivings in Brin & Page (1998)), but people are definitely not happy with how the dominant search engine has done ads.

      1. relevant, clearly labelled, and fair (as in not unfair in the FTC sense)

      It is pretty striking to me how text-heavy Perplexity AI’s SERP is for this query: “highly-rated” x10?

      My experience has generally been much better, but I’m not normally doing queries like this.

      Here’s a link to the same query as that in the screenshot below (which, is likely not using their Copilot):

      Perplexity AI [ I want to buy a new SUV which brand is best? ]

      • note also the generated follow-on prompts under Related
      @jowyang

      Seven reasons why perplexity.ai is better than Google search:

      1. No ads.
      2. All the content in one place.
      3. No ads.
      4. You can chat with it and get additional details.
      5. No ads.
      6. Sources are provided with URLs.
      7. No ads.

      Here’s a screenshot of car reviews, as just one of infinite examples. Perplexity is focused on being the search tool in the age of AI.

      I saw a demo from @AravSrinivas at the Synthedia conference hosted by @bretkinsella. I’ll have closing remarks.

      Example search results for Perplexity AI On Twitter Jun 27, 2023

      References

      Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks, 30, 107–117. http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html [brin1998anatomy]