Celeste has worked in the online marketing space for twenty years. She has written for sectors including tourism, sustainability, education, lifestyle, food, and marketing. You can find her work featured by Green Building Media South Africa, Stodels Gardening, and The Post House Hotel. In magazines, you may have seen her in The Cape Times, Oprah South Africa, and The Property Magazine. While you can find her writing up on the latest SEO trends and exploring digital techniques during the day, her love of story-telling carries on in enriched games and books after hours.
For years, Google has had a monopoly on the search engine game. There was a little competition in the beginning with Yahoo and, more recently, a potential threat from Bing, but that has all died down. Or has it? Let's take a closer look at Perplexity AI vs. Google and see if Google might have to (finally) squeeze up a little and make room for the future of search.
What is Perplexity AI?
It launched in 2022 and is available both as a search option in browsers and as an app for mobile devices. The platform operates on a freemium model, where the basic features are free, but there is a subscription option. Once you subscribe and pay, you'll have access to use other capabilities like choosing from multiple AI models, being able to do file uploads, and having API access.
What is an answer engine?
Its main focus is to interpret the intent behind a question. From there, it delivers relevant, contextually accurate information in a summarized form. With its language model technology, the answer engine aims to eliminate the need for users to sift through search results. Instead, it gives an immediate, factual response.
Google & AI
Even today, with AI-technology answer engines hitting the scene, Google is still staying ahead of the trend. The company has incorporated its own AI-technology into it's search functionality, making it a hybrid of both search and answer engines. Some of these features include their Snippets and AI Overview.
However, for some users, the new add-ons, along with the current ones, are making the interface overly cluttered and overwhelming for users. This is bringing out new challenges for Google, especially with cleaner answer engines emerging.
Let's take a deeper look at the core differences between these two search platforms:
Google is more feature-rich compared to Perplexity AI. It offers users tools like Google Maps, personalized results, and integrations with services like Gmail and Google Scholar. They also have paid advertising options for businesses to create sponsored ads in prime positions and a vast understanding of the web, thanks to algorithms and keyword technology.
However, SEO tactics and paid advertisements often feature above organic results, which could make it confusing for users. Users could also find the various boxes of information on the search result page cluttered with sponsored ads, local business maps, people questions, snippets, and now AI overviews.
Perplexity AI distinguishes itself with its lack of ads and clean, minimized answers results. Instead of providing a list of ranked websites, it provides concise answers that are cited, making it a useful platform for researches where accuracy and depth are important.
Overall, Google offers users an experience that is wide and gives them different multimedia options, locations, text extracts, and website rankings, while Perplexity AI offers a more focused, AI-enhanced alternative that prioritizes precision. This makes it a strong competitor in the ever evolving search landscape.
The different search approaches in Perplexity AI vs. Google
If you are looking for a quick answer that is direct and concise, then Perplexity AI is definitely the choice you should go for. It can give you a summary response to complex questions and be a simple solution for a quick search.
AI technology also allows for contextual conversation, so you can follow up and have a one-on-one dialogue with the technology.
But that is not to say that Google doesn't have its pros. The advantage of using Google is its diversity. You can have a lot more resources and a variety of different types with the platform. It can give you multimedia responses, news, articles, and shopping options. It is also well ahead of the curve in terms of its location services.
If you are conducting in-depth research that requires you to explore a wide variety of resources, including scientific papers, blogs, and multimedia, then Google's vast index is still unmatched.
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