well whether popular doesn't neceserally mean ungood. though I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to search engines as the amount they have to build up information wise to potentially be good is pretty extreme, it's unlikely that someone could accomplish it without actually being known
edit: oh shit, it's just AI crap.. nevermind any of my potential it's not impossible that a hidden gem would be feasilble it's AI crap. No nobody needs a search engine to bring up something that you can't verify if it's credible information or just random guesses made by what's popular on the internet... completely worthless.
Wot? Perplexity ai, that app that I have on my phone and that I sometimes ask random things when I want to be angry at something and that gives entirely useless and wrong answers 95% of the time? lollmaoeven
It is good for answering simple questions. It isn't a search engine its more of an answers engine wherby you ask something and it will do the search and procure the answer from the results. It works well most of the time however like all AI it hulicinates so if you ask it something too complex it isnt very good.
When the citations are on point, I like AI search. 9 times out of 10 I care enough to read the source though.
However, there are still way too many hallucinations when it comes to sources in my experience. It just wastes my time when I go to verify and find that AI just spat out garbage.
The best search engine for my money is kagi. It's $5 a month but there's no ads, I get to block pinterest and I downranked fandom wikis. There's even a fediverse filter.
Can't say much in regards to perplexity, but I find kagi's index to be quite nice. Especially if you find fortune forum posts helpful (which I do as a software dev). It's paid only, so there's no advertising incentive to the company and also a ton of configuration. I search a lot, so I went with the 10 dollar plan. 5 bucks gets you 300 searches a month, 10 is unlimited plus access to their LLM which documents information sources like perplexity.
Personally, I found perplexity to be quite annoying with the more ai focused UI and trying to learn your interests. Kagi is a search engine first plus some other features they're developing.
As far as I know, Kagi doesn't have their own index. They use a mix of google and brave's results (maybe some other search engines too?), and then sort their results to give "better" ordered results.
I didn’t read this article but yes. I’ve basically stopped using search engines altogether now and use Perplexity. It’s nice to be able to say “that didn’t work, here’s the error” and “double check your work because this is important” and it just…does it. It’s not perfect but it’s miles better than googling up that 5 year old Stack Overflow post with your exact question and zero answers.