Google used to be great. At any time, you were just a few taps away from the answer to any question you can imagine.
For the last few years, though, Google has become increasingly enshittified. Trying to solve a problem using Google leads to a collection of bullshit articles written automatically by bots and AI.
When I started interacting with those sites, I thought Google would very shortly bury them in the search results. But for some incomprehensible reason that’s not happened. Only Google knows why they have decided to let their primary product in a state of slow decay. For the last couple years searching has become useless. I find myself appending «Reddit» (or any other specific reputable site) to all my searches if I had any hopes of finding useful information.
So the solution to a technology that fills the internet with bullshit is another technology capable of filtering it out. In that context I discovered Perplexity.
Perplexity is what happens when you let ChatGPT search on the internet. Instead of spitting random words that may or may not be true, Perplexity analyzes the question you give them and bases the answer on search results coming from that question.
The result is an answer that includes references and links to the information it’s based on. It’s able to give reasoned answers like the ones you’d get from ChatGPT, but also give you some confidence on the credibility of its answers, or at least the opportunity to contrast them.
After a few weeks, I found myself slowly replacing the «thought» of searching something on Google with the one of looking it up on Perplexity. And as a tech-avid user that’s been using Google daily for decades, that’s saying a lot.
After failing to find what I’m looking for from Google, getting it in a few seconds from Perplexity is mind-bending. And at some point I will just not bother trying with Google anymore.
Daniel Barca 