Amid ongoing controversy about handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity now displays results for factual queries corresponding to weather and time at a spot, currency conversion, and answers to simple arithmetic queries directly through cards. It is a move to stop Perplexity users from going to other search engines like google and yahoo like Google for such results.
To be clear, Perplexity could already fetch this data from the online and display ends in a descriptive way, but the corporate is adding some visual flair to those results to make them more outstanding and quick. On X, CEO Aravind Srinivas said that these basic queries now should work fast on the search engine.
Notably, Srinivas said last yr that Google handles basic queries like weather, time and live sports scores well, and his company had loads of work to do. While Google displays loads of card-based info, including sports tournament tables and basic movie information, Perplexity also moves within the direction of displaying direct results as an alternative of fetching from other sources.
For these latest search results, corresponding to weather info and currency conversions, Perplexity doesn’t link to any sources. Last month, Srinivas mentioned that the search startup was working with an organization called Tako, an AI search engine for visualizing information, to display information corresponding to stock prices.
Earlier this month, Perplexity faced criticism from the media, as Forbes identified that the search engine is showing search results about its original, paywalled reporting without proper attribution and with near similar writing language in the corporate’s recently launched Pages feature. Forbes said that its reporting about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone company was also mentioned prominently in Perplexity’s AI-generated podcast.
The argument from various critics is that without proper credits and getting enough link-back traffic in return, AI-powered search engines like google and yahoo generating (or re-generating) media content will eat up publications’ business.
Last week, the Amazon-backed startup’s chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told Semafor that the company was already exploring revenue-sharing deals with publications. He said that these deals would allow the publishers to earn recurring income.
