No. of Recommendations: 13
Finding obscure information that my Google searches couldn't
This is probably my biggest single use.
Anecdotally, it seems like the Google keyword search division is trying to improve its results (due to LLM competition) by guessing what you're really looking for, and as a result making it much worse because it isn't very good at guessing. The results seem more and more intent on giving you a very popular site within the general subject that you search for, rather than something related to what you actually typed. It seems happy to ignore 2 of 3 specific keywords if the third one is a popular subject. Switching to "verbatim" mode helps, and "advanced search", but not as much as you'd hope. It still gives you pages that don't contain the "mandatory" keywords if it has popular pages on the same subject. I really with there were a way to have mandatory keywords in the image search. (there are ways to specify this, but it seems not to do anything)
Perplexity does seem to do better than that. A large fraction of the results are wrong (you have to check the references), most particularly since it seems to have the original sin flaw of believing everything it reads on web pages including marketing blurbs, but it really does help. What I like most about Perplexity is that most sentences have footnotes saying where they got the information, and that the results are updated continually so you can ask about yesterday's news items.
A random recent search, I was looking for an LED driver that has a rotary dimmer knob right on the driver. No combination of keywords seemed able to find one, only dimmers that work *with* LED drivers. Perplexity found one right away.
I notice that it doesn't have a sense of spatial awareness. For example, asking for the three shops of type X closest to a specific location seems to give you results almost anywhere in that city. Currently, anyway.
I would like to get the Pro version, but I don't like the idea of all my queries being used to build a profile of me. I used to be in the profiling business, and once you have seen how the sausage is made you lean towards digital vegetarianism.
Jim
