Amid ongoing controversy over the handling of media articles and original reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity has begun displaying results for fact-based queries, such as weather, time in a location, currency conversions, and answers to simple math questions, directly in its cards, to prevent Perplexity users from going to other search engines like Google for such results.
To be clear, Perplexity can already scrape this data from the web and display the results in an easy-to-understand way, but the company is adding a visual twist to those results to make them more eye-catching and quicker to view. X CEO Aravind Srinivas said that these basic queries should run fast on the search engine.
Notably, Srinivas said last year that Google handles basic queries like weather, time, and live sports scores well, and that the company has a lot of work to do. While Google surfaces a lot of card-based information, like sports tournament tables and basic movie information, Perplexity is also moving toward displaying results directly rather than retrieving them from other sources.
Google is still better than stumped when it comes to weather, time, live sports scores, directions, etc. So, we still have a long way to go.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) July 9, 2023
As for new search results like weather information or currency conversions, Perplexity did not link to any sources. Last month, Srinivas said the search startup was partnering with a company called Tako, an AI search engine that visualizes information, to show things like stock prices.
An answer engine needs to be able to answer the basic facts about anything, but returning long summaries is not enough. Dense units of information are essential. We Takobiz Further use of knowledge cards… pic.twitter.com/LRCpSnhhLs
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) May 21, 2024
Earlier this month, Perplexity came under fire from the media when Forbes editor-in-chief John Paczkowski pointed out that the search engine was showing Forbes' paid-for coverage of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's drone company in search results without proper attribution and with nearly identical wording to Perplexity's recently launched Pages feature. Forbes said the company's coverage was also featured prominently in Perplexity's AI-generated podcast.
Various critics argue that without proper credit and sufficient link-back traffic in return, AI-powered search engines that generate (or regenerate) media content will eat into publications’ businesses.
Dmitry Shevelenko, the Amazon-backed startup's chief operating officer, told Semaphore last week that the company is already exploring revenue-sharing deals with publishers, which he said would provide them with recurring revenue.