Ha ha, I’d say gen-AI is no better or worse than influencers and random strangers on message boards and social media. After all, that’s where a lot of the data is scraped from!
:-)
I tried the CSE extension… I had duckduckgo configured as Allowed in Safari. I set up CSE to the Perplexity site. Now when I do a search it seems to go to duckduckgo then forward to perplexity… That slows things down. Is this correct?
Sorry, what is “the %s substitution”?
It’s the placeholder value in the URLs used to insert the text you enter when the query is sent off to the search engine. The %s is replaced by whatever query you type.
What I mean is, since all the examples in the article already use that same %s placeholder, they will work in Firefox as they do in the other browsers mentioned
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If you first activate Preplexity, it will take longer as you do an extensive search and write an organized footnoted summary. However, the second setting is a switch to turn on ‘Quick Search’. This allows you to send the prompt directly to a search engine by prefacing it with the appropriate abbreviation (list by tapping the ‘Quick Search Engines’ list). They’re pretty much what you would expect (‘g’ for Google, ‘b’ for Bing, ‘ddg’ for DuckDuckGo, etc.).
Verification is always essential when accuracy matters, but answer engines don’t change the situation at all.
I was recently conducting research on business cyber insurance and sought clarification on whether the statistics being shared applied to small and medium-sized businesses as well as large firms. (According to the 2024 IBM Cost of a Data Breach survey, the average cost of a data breach is $4.88 million globally and $9.36 million in the US, which are numbers that don’t mesh well with my view of what a small or medium-sized business could afford.)
The initial answer engine responses claimed there were specifics related to smaller companies, but when I followed them, I ended up at articles that summarized the IBM study and made claims about smaller firms. I went to the IBM study and found that, apart from a statement about over 600 companies of various sizes being surveyed, the researchers explicitly did not collect demographic information about the companies surveyed for privacy reasons.
In other words, the answer engines provided me with inaccurate data because people had generated incorrect information about the IBM study. When I asked ChatGPT about the mistakes and prompted it to examine the primary source, it acknowledged that no information about company size was provided.
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Adam – Is there a reason you omitted Gemini as an AI answer engine? I have asked some complicated questions and the 2.0 Flash version has produced satisfactory results. AFAIK it’s free.
Based on my non-AI (no Assist used) supported DDG search: Gemini is an AI ‘product’ of Google/Meta/Alphabet/etc. So I’m sure it will “do no evil”. 
As with Grok, I wasn’t aware that Gemini included real-time Web searches in its responses. It does seem to be able to do so—I could ask it “What has TidBITS written about text fragment linking?” and it knew about my article from yesterday and linked to it.
However, in no other query I’ve fed it from my spreadsheet of answer engine queries did it reference any sources or provide links to source material. I consider that an essential feature of an answer engine because otherwise there’s no way you can check what it’s saying.
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A PR person sent me a link to this study about AI chatbots and search engines. It’s interesting, though it’s also clear that there’s no real competition here, either between Google and other search engines (Google has 1631.5 billion visits to Bing’s 60.1 billion, a 27x difference), or search engines and chatbots in general (1863 billion versus 55.2 billion, a 34x difference). The infographic lays it all out.
Realistically, I think answer engines will win out, but by all the traditional search engines moving toward providing answers, not by ChatGPT and Perplexity supplanting Google.
But it’s not a zero-sum game. There’s room for numerous players. It does make one wonder what Apple will do, though. The ChatGPT and possible Gemini integration with Siri is pretty minimal.
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I’m curious to see what will happen as the Google antitrust matter plays out (this appears to be party agnostic - it’s been running since 2020). If Google is required to stop paying device manufacturers to be the default (or only?) search engine, how will that affect the overall landscape?
Interesting chart Adam. Extraordinary position Yahoo still maintains. Surprised.
Its quite something to see how ChatGPT has so rapidly achieved the reach it has. That rate of growth has very few precedents.
Yes, if Google can’t pay to be the default search engine anymore, that may change things. But a roughly 30x difference in traffic will take a long time to break down, and as I said, “googling” is a verb. No one ever talks about “binging” or “duckduckgoing” or “chatgpting”.
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Something concerning I saw earlier today: Perplexity does not make their terms of service and privacy policies easy to find (no links on the site). Once you find them (the guy found them by guessing the URLs), they essentially say that they can track and profile you automatically, and share the data however they want, with whomever they want.
The guy who wrote the thread was Luke Mulks, the VP BizOps for the Brave browser. Unfortunately, the thread is on X. I can export it out to .pdf if requested. The context was Proton pointing out that the Perplexity CEO says it’s ok to track everything to serve “hyper personalized” ads. I’m trying not to get into the weeds, but privacy and security are important, so I watch various sources for things that may affect me.
I wouldn’t assume that Perplexity is the only AI Answer Engine in this boat, and it’s not like most of the search engines aren’t already harvesting data.
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Interesting. Frederico Viticci on MacStories quotes a year old article in Wired which says that they don’t respect robots files blocking scraping either. What Siri Isn't: Perplexity's Voice Assistant and the Potential of LLMs Integrated with iOS - MacStories
Viticci’s piece is about how Perplexity does what Siri should be able to.
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He wasn’t looking very hard—it took me two clicks. I scrolled to the bottom of the Perplexity page but didn’t see many links, so I clicked one that seemed likely to provide more information about the company (Blog). Then I scrolled to the bottom of the blog page and found the privacy link.
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/legal/privacy-policy
Then I asked Perplexity about its privacy policy and to compare it with others, which is about the level that I had time to look into this. 
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-recast-perplexity-s-pri-IfTkw_UUSLu9pAoqeqRgFg
Thanks, Adam! I was in the middle of looking for data for work when I found it, so I didn’t go down the rabbit hole myself. It doesn’t surprise me that the claims may have been “enhanced” for shock value. I’m still worried about privacy around the AI engines, although it’s not limited to Perplexity (and I’m still kicking the tires with it). I’m still kind of leaning towards using the Kagi Assistant, as it provides access to multiple models and emphasizes privacy (see below).
Privacy
When you use the Assistant by Kagi, your data is never used to train AI models (not by us or by the LLM providers), and no account information is shared with the LLM providers. By default, threads are deleted after 24 hours of inactivity. This behavior can be adjusted in the settings.
Adam, thanks for the great article. Would it be possible to share your Keyboard Maestro macro? Thanks!
Sure—here’s a copy. It’s nothing special, but there are a few little bits that might get you over a hump.
QuadAI Search.kmmacros (12.9 KB)
I decided to try out the Vanderbilt course “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT”. I used several AI’s to search for courses, but this seems to be the best for me. It is taught by Dr. Jules White (Dr. Jules White, Instructor | Coursera) He has the best instructor’s voice and manner I have ever come across. Thanks for telling us about it!
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