Credit: Perplexity AI

You're not crazy: "Google fu" doesn't work like it used to. Google's near-total dominance over web searches means that every move it makes is consequential. But Google Search doesn't treat Verbatim and Boolean Search like it used to—and its bolted-on AI search assistant is notorious for low-quality results.

Meanwhile, a rising tide of SEO-driven AI slop has diluted high-quality content, making it difficult to get to the results that answer your query without wading through ads and sponcon. Perplexity AI, an American AI search startup, hopes to step into the AI search gap and make a name for itself with its eponymous AI-powered search and reference bot.

The idea behind Perplexity is simple: What if the AI search assistant wasn't an afterthought tacked onto a fully functional search engine, but a core part of the search engine baked in from the beginning?

What kind of tech powers Perplexity? Like other AIs in its class, Perplexity is a generative pre-trained transformer: a type of neural network whose great strength is its ability to perform mathematical operations on large arrays of data with high bit depth. Perplexity uses Bing to search the web, and its backend software runs on the Microsoft Azure supercomputer. Its ad integration is bankrolled partly by Amazon, whose search results will feature prominently alongside Shopify products in Perplexity's inline advertising cards; whether or not that's good news depends on how much you like Jeff Bezos.

The free tier of Perplexity uses the company's standalone large language model based on . The addition of browsing to a garden-variety chatbot is a core component of Perplexity's ability to serve as a research assistant. Users can also define trusted resources or place sites on an exclusion list. Allowing the AI to browse the web is a relatively new feature that helps mitigate a longstanding accuracy problem common to AI chatbots. An AI that can only query its training data may return outdated information that has since been superseded, making its answer inaccurate. In comparison, Perplexity's AI research assistant frequently indexes the web.

In addition to the features included with the free tier, Enterprise or Pro users can also select the AI backend they want to use for a query, from a roster including (as of May 2025) the OpenAI model families that power ChatGPT (including o3-mini, GPT-4o and GPT-4.5), as well as Claude Sonnet 3.7, Gemini Flash 2.0, Llama 3 and DeepSeek R1.

To try out Perplexity for free, navigate to perplexity.ai in a web browser of your choice. This is what you'll see:

Credit: ExtremeTech/Perplexity AI

If you have a query in mind, you can type it right into the box. If you'd rather have a quick demo first, click in the input field; a drop-down menu will appear offering a selection of sample search queries informed by current events and trends. Come back in an hour, and your suggestions will be different.

Credit: ExtremeTech/Perplexity AI

We decided to take the AI up on its suggestion to "create a healthy recipe with Mexican flavors." In response, it produced simple recipes (minimal prep, suitable for beginners) for a chicken and black bean burrito bowl and then a fajita bowl recipe that both passed the quality test. Both were loaded with veggies and fragrant with the flavors of Mexico and the desert Southwest. No glued-on pizza cheese here.

Credit: ExtremeTech/Perplexity AI

Following the thread, we asked "What are some quick and easy healthy Mexican recipes," and the searchbot proffered a variety of links from places like Taste of Home, allrecipes, the Mexican food subreddit, and the BBC's Good Food recipe collection.

Now, it's not difficult to find recipes for Mexican cuisine that are healthy, flavorful, inexpensive, and easily prepared. As queries go, this is a real softball, but it's also a good litmus test. We requested recipes in the plural, and results were weighted toward free sources of multiple recipes. Listicles like "33+ Healthy Mexican Recipes" can be a toss-up. Still, the Good Food recipe database is expansive and easily navigated, and r/mexicanfood has human foodies and experienced home cooks moderating the board.

Back to Google fu: Once upon a boardroom, Google was a keyword-driven search engine that used simple Boolean syntax (AND, NOT, asterisk wildcards, quote marks around verbatim search terms). Classic Google fu-informed web search queries looked like this:

(neodymium OR dysprosium) AND tariff* NOT China site:usgs.gov

"grilled cheese recipe" AND tomatoes AND bacon NOT avocado

For the longest time, you could type a query into a Google search bar and you'd get a tidy list of ten hyperlinks, some with thumbnail images or a brief description. Job done.

These days, things are different. You can have a conversation, shallow though it may be, with ChatGPT, and it will respond—in any tone you ask it to take. Likewise, Copilot is designed to accept queries in natural language, so users can use inexact phrasing and just speak to the chatbot as though it were a friendly librarian or personal assistant. Even Google Search, with its historically keyword-driven approach, can parse some natural language.

Perplexity isn't exactly a chatbot, at least not in the same way that character.ai, ChatGPT, and Copilot are chatbots. Copilot gets downright conversational. By contrast, Perplexity is an AI built to do search engine things that also knows how to parse some natural language and deliver a grammatically valid reply. Perplexity's research assistant is probably the perihelion, as far as whether it feels like a chatbot, because the assistant is built to go back and forth with you: to refine your query and zero in on the most relevant or useful results. No Google fu required.

Since it's a research-oriented AI search tool, it wasn't built with some of the features common to the major general-purpose chatbots. For example, ChatGPT can generate images based on a prompt or sketch using the DALL-E image creation AI. Perplexity was designed to pursue a research topic with you, but it doesn't have an image-creation tool. Then again, neither does Google Search.

Using Perplexity feels a lot like using any other search engine, especially with its keyword-centric expectations. Instead of a profoundly different type of search experience, the Perplexity UX distinguishes itself by the results it produced. Google Search delivers lists of links to recipes, while Perplexity delivers both plaintext recipes and also web links to other recipes for our perusal. Furthermore, the paid versions have bells and whistles that Google Search simply doesn't offer.

Like the chatbots from other major AI companies, Perplexity operates on a freemium model. Its first paid tier, Perplexity Pro, is currently available for $20 US per month. Paid users get access to more specialized search tools, including customized news briefings and a research assistant aimed at students and professionals.

Starting at $40 per person per month, Perplexity's Enterprise service tier offers additional tools. The most powerful, Internal Knowledge Search, can run targeted analytics on files you upload (Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoints in the most recent Microsoft file formats, as well as PDFs and CSVs) while simultaneously searching the web.

Perplexity has taken its cues from Google in its approach to user data collection. In addition to their web interface, the AI startup has apps for Android and iOS, as well as a browser in the works. Perplexity has voiced a keen interest in buying Chrome if Google is forced to sell it off due to the DOJ's ongoing antitrust investigation.

Like Google, Perplexity's bottom line depends on hoovering up a constant stream of user data. Sure, you'll get more relevant search results if you can do a little back-and-forth with the AI, but the company's interest in getting to know you goes beyond professional pride. During an appearance on the TBPN podcast, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said one reason Perplexity is building its own browser, Comet, is to collect data on what users do outside its app—so it can sell premium, hyper-personalized ads. Perplexity is betting that its users will be fine with their AI-enhanced browsers tracking everything they do because the ads should be more personally relevant.

“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal."

And work-related queries won't help Perplexity build a dossier on you that's accurate enough to specifically target you.

"On the other hand," he explained, "what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you.”

Perplexity is in this kind of tracking. It's called conversion analysis. For example, Meta's Pixel tracking program collects data on visitors to many websites—whether or not the person browsing even has a Facebook account.

“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe, you know, through our Discover feed we could show some ads there,” Srinivas added.

At least he's willing to say the quiet part out loud. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Listen: Use your best judgment when using any online services, including search engines. Generally speaking, it's not wise to disclose much online. The Perplexity search bot comes with a boilerplate disclaimer asking the user to please not enter anything offensive, classified, restricted, legally privileged, or personally identifying. Maybe don't upload anything with trade secrets or kompromat in it.

At the same time, it's already possible to reconstruct a person's movement, analyze their health, habits, and relationships, and even profile their personality with only the legal, commercially available mass data aggregation tools that exist today. Tools as ubiquitous as CAPTCHA/RECAPTCHA and Google Analytics routinely track things like where a website user's cursor lingers and how long, where a user came from, or where they navigate to when they leave, and the time elapsed before they scroll or click.

Not to get too dystopian on main, but Phillip K. Dick saw this coming. The panopticon is already here, and it's ad-supported.

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