Google Search recently celebrated its 26th anniversary. During this quarter of a century, it has become THE place to find everything on the internet, you don’t look for things, you google them. It’s become second nature to simply tap the Google search bar on your phone whenever a question comes to mind. But lately, you must have noticed that your search experience has become too erratic, especially since the arrival of generative AI.

Rest assured you are not alone, Google search results have indeed gotten worse. Google even recently added AI Overviews as an interim solution, but it is unreliable to the point of being unusable. Things like this have been piling up over the past few months, which is why I’ve now turned to Google Searchs AI-first alternatives for my internet needs, and I don’t want to go back.

Using Perplexity as an Alternative to Google Search

It can do what Google does and much more

Many new age AI companies have tried to reinvent search engines from the ground up, even the Arc browser has one built in, but Perplexity is by far the most popular of them all.

When you send your query to Perplexity, it searches a set of search results for you and provides you with a quick summary. It’s especially useful, for example, when you need a step-by-step guide to something or a nice overview of a complex topic. People even use it to get their morning news summary, with the option to dig deeper into a story if something strikes your fancy.

My job as a technology journalist often requires me to refer to numerous resources for my articles and to scan long documents to find a single piece of relevant information. This significantly reduced the time required for such in-depth research. It can easily find things like user anecdotes on public forums beyond the most common (Reddit, Quora, etc.) and tell me the exact piece of text in an article I was looking for.

For example, Perplexity has proven useful for discussing which celebrity voices Geminis should embrace; I could easily compare each celebrity’s voice quality with what I thought was their most distinctive feature in terms of accuracy. Without it, if I were to check if Matthew McConaughey had another prominent accent, I would have to go through tons of interviews and fan pages to find this obscure information.

This AI goodness is also useful for my personal curiosities. Once, looking The family guy, I had absolutely no memory of what exactly happened when Peter Griffin lost his old job. I explained to Perplexity the reason for my mental situation and it immediately gave me the exact answer I wanted. It only took a few seconds of disruption before I could move on with my life.

This search feature is just one part of Perplexity that I use almost exclusively. It offers many other focused modes, specially designed for problems such as math problems, academics, searching videos or social discussions, among others. You can try them for yourself to see how they fit into your workflow.

Perplexity has its problems too

Even though Perplexity has largely integrated itself into my workflow, it’s hard to overlook many of its flaws related to both its functionality and the broader discussion of AI ethics. The AI ​​search engine was flagged not long ago for its lack of clear citations, which has since improved significantly. The research summary produced by Perplexity is now correctly linked to all its sources with inline attributions.

Another, more significant problem with Perplexity involves the removal of Internet data without the consent of the original publishers, sometimes even making paid content available for free. The AI ​​tool has also been accused of plagiarism in its AI-generated text. In response, the company established a publisher partnership program to share ad revenue with media outlets that appear in its search results.

ChatGPT sits between Google and Perplexity

The way I phrase my search queries has changed forever

The Google search bar compressed by Perplexity and ChatGPT on my phone’s home screen perfectly illustrates how it has lost 50% importance in my life.

ChatGPT is not a search engine in the usual sense, mainly because its data sets are not always up to date and it does not check the Internet by default before answering your questions (its parent company works on its own AI search engine).

However, it remains perhaps the best general-purpose AI tool for everything from correcting my grammar in texts when I’m feeling lazy to summarizing my freelance contracts to highlight any clauses that puts me at the end of the stick.

I use Perplexity to get simple answers to my queries, while ChatGPT functions more as my creative bounce board. I would chat with him to come up with funny names for my friends’ WhatsApp group and sometimes I would brainstorm and define the central theme of a personal essay I am writing.

For a pedantic person like me who wants that exact phrase in their writing, but can’t remember it, ChatGPT is a godsend (I’m aware how ironic that sounds). I can tell it what I want to convey and the jumble of words I have in mind, and it will deliver the exact phrase I was looking for in seconds. Try this with Google search and you’ll end up scouring forums, dictionaries and thesauri just to find what’s on the tip of your tongue.

This had such an impact on me that it completely changed the way I phrased questions. Instead of piecing together a specific string of keywords followed by source IDs like Reddit to get the correct results, I could just ask my question the same way I’m talking about here. Of course, this takes up more space than a short Google search query, but this way I can elaborate on exactly what I’m thinking. And with AI, the more context you provide, the better the results.

Gemini is currently a mixed bag

Frankly, Gemini is by far the easiest chatbot to access on all the best Android phones, you can simply swipe up from either bottom corner to bring it up. Yet, it’s my least used AI tool. Gemini has not only yet caught up to ChatGPT in everyday tasks, but its insights into AI in search have also had far too many errors to rely on compared to products designed from the ground up for AI.

I still rely on Google Search for any factual information that is still clearly presented in the knowledge graph, like finding the name of a movie director. And Google’s dictionary lookup is by far the quickest way I’ve found to look up synonyms. I even have a custom search engine configured for this specific function in my browser.

However, my reliance on Google Search has decreased significantly, with ChatGPT and Perplexity now handling the bulk of my web queries. In an ideal world, I would be able to combine all the different goals into one reliable AI product, whose results I can trust 100% without fact-checking. But unfortunately, the world we live in is far from that.