I migrated most of my internet search to DuckDuckGo years ago when I switched to Firefox as my main browser and only rarely use Google search so I haven’t noticed the steady decline in utility reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in The Register.
DuckDuckGo works well for me, but I was intrigued by Mr. Vaughan-Nichols description of Perplexity so I thought I’d give it a try and see if AI is really a killer app for search.
I’ve been working on writing a simple GNOME extension (more on that in a later post) and tried “how to write a gnome extension” search in Perplexity. The results that came back were accurate and useful. It’s nice that they include the sources at the very top so you can investigate further.
Compared to the same search on DuckDuckGo, the inclusion of the summary steps in Perplexity was nice. To get the same information from the DDG search, you have to go a step deeper into the sources. That is the paradigm that I’m used to. I find the summary to be nice but not essential.
I tried a few other searches as well and the summaries and results in Perplexity were similarly useful. Based on the good experience, I’ll work it into my information search and retrieval workflow. I don’t know if it is a killer app, but it is useful.