I’m looking for a quick answer to a question. How to use a piece of software, finding an article, looking for a product (where Amazon isn’t my starting point) etc.
The use cases where I relied on Google from 1998 to 2024 (I remember the first Stanford Daily article about the company and was a power user from basically day one).
Perplexity Pro.
No ads (for now) and easy to dig into sources are the base improvements over Google.
The big differentiator for me is the “Related” section, which is the equivalent to “Want to go deeper?” as the 5 next searches to pursue. Not only is it easy to go deeper on each specific search, but also across searches it teaches me more broadly the most relevant areas to dig into.
Here’s an example from a search asking about Nvidia’s stock over the past 12 months HERE:
I think these 5 follow-up questions are higher quality than if you asked me my next 5 questions for the same initial query.
BTW, I decided to ask Perplexity why people love it - it gives a better answer than mine :)
Here are a few example searches and answers from the past few days:
The main takeaway is that I use Perplexity for pretty much anything where I want an immediate answer, blending work and personal stuff**.** The exceptions are if I want an image or a precise URL, I’ll still sometimes go to Google. And if I want to go deeper, I’ll use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek (see my next update on going deeper).
As one final example, I use voice mode on Perplexity quite a bit, especially when I’m first getting in the car. I’ll ask “What are the top 5 tech stories today?” followed by “What are the top 5 AI stories today?”
I installed Perplexity as my default search in Chrome, so if I start typing in the address bar instead of going to Google it goes straight to Perplexity. Here are the instructions - from Perplexity, of course - on how to do it; it takes <30 minutes to make the change:
how do i make perplexity my default search engine in chrome
Finally, I don’t have a great sense of whether Perplexity Pro is worth it for every user - to me, $20/month for a product I use 10 to 30 times a day feels like clear value - where, again, I think Perplexity’s answer is better than mine: