newsletter banner

ISSUE 21.46.F • 2024-11-11 • Text Alerts!Gift Certificates
You’re reading the FREE newsletter

Plus Membership

You’ll immediately gain access to the longer, better version of the newsletter when you make a donation and become a Plus Member. You’ll receive all the articles shown in the table of contents below, plus access to all our premium content for the next 12 months. And you’ll have access to our complete newsletter archive!

Upgrade to Plus membership today and enjoy all the Plus benefits!

In this issue

PUBLIC DEFENDER: Perplexity is 10 times better than Google

Additional articles in the PLUS issue

WINDOWS 11: How to add all types of accounts in Windows 11

MICROSOFT 365: Microsoft 365 gets “Copilot Lite”

ON SECURITY: You clicked on that phish?


ADVERTISEMENT
Tech Brew

CrashPlan

Protect what matters most with CrashPlan. Our seamless, secure backup solutions cover Mac, Windows, and Linux devices. Keep your files safe from crashes and ransomware.

Start your free trial today.


PUBLIC DEFENDER

Perplexity is 10 times better than Google

Brian Livingston

By Brian Livingston Comment about this article

The chatbot wars are well underway, and one result is that I find myself using the new Perplexity search engine 99% of the time, falling back on Google only to look up a street address or some trivial factoid.

Google has served up its now-familiar list of 10 links for years. Perplexity also points you to several websites and videos. But its result pages begin with a well-written summary of what you’d learn if you actually visited all those links and vids.

It takes me less than a minute to read Perplexity’s superb, human-quality summary of whatever information I asked about. By contrast, evaluating Google’s links — after I’ve located them amidst the search giant’s omnipresent ads — can take me 10 minutes. That’s the basis of the “10 times” superlative in my headline. I’ll be the first to admit that that isn’t really scientific, but it’s close.

Chatbots by market share, September 2024
Figure 1. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot — which both use the same GPT model — and Google’s Gemini have massive market shares. But appearing as if from nowhere, Perplexity is close behind the leaders and growing fast.Source: First Page Sage article

Of course, you can pose questions these days to any number of chatbots. Some are listed in Figure 1. But I believe Perplexity is well designed enough to overtake Google’s Gemini chatbot — which is currently in “preview mode” — and even suck market share away from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (both of which use the same GPT large language model, or LLM).

Just to state the obvious, many people assume that “nothing will ever replace Google.” But this simply ain’t so. Yes, Google has enjoyed an über-dominant role in search for the past 20 years. But search-engine leadership has actually changed several times since the Dawn of Tech:

  • Lycos and WebCrawler launched in 1994. They were among the first search engines to allow visitors to find any word on any webpage they’d indexed. Lycos pioneered prefix matching and word-proximity searching.
  • Yahoo Directory became one of the world’s most popular websites. Unlike today’s crawlers, which scoop up everything, Yahoo was valued for its curation of content by human reviewers. The directory grew by 1999 to serving more than 1 billion queries per month.
  • AltaVista was, for a time, the “unbeatable” search engine. It used a speedy bot named “Scooter” to create an unparalleled Web index. As of 2000, 17.7% of Web users searched with AltaVista, while only 7% used the newer Google search engine. It was considered impossible for anything to displace AltaVista. But today, the site simply redirects to Yahoo.
  • Google didn’t launch until 1998 but ultimately won the game. Its fast response time and innovative PageRank system — which rated websites for relevance — impressed users and attracted traffic. Google grew to over 90% of search-engine market share by 2002.

I believe it’s now Google’s turn to be disrupted by the onrushing power of new technology.

Perplexity itself hammers home the difference between a mere listing of links and its concise roundup of information. The bot firmly announces that it’s an answer engine rather than a search engine. For large enterprises, the firm’s marketers call it a response engine. We’ll see.

Leading off with a summary makes all the difference in the world

It’s far beyond the scope of this column for me to test and rate scores of queries on all the chatbots shown in Figure 1, much less the numerous smaller challengers that spring up every day. I’ll leave that to tech bloggers who seem to have unlimited time — and sponsors.

But one thing is for certain: I’m impressed every time I enter a question that I assume Perplexity knows nothing about. Invariably, I receive a coherent overview of the topic, which would have taken me up to an hour when using ordinary search tools and exploring where the links lead.

The prose at times may be a little dry — kind of like Wikipedia, if it had just awakened from a nap — but you often want “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Sgt. Joe Friday said in the movie “Dragnet.”

For example, I asked Perplexity how to install Windows 11 on a PC that doesn’t meet Microsoft’s stringent requirements. I thought the bot would dispense generalities about not offending the Redmond gods. But instead, the answer engine actually described five different ways in detail. The first method is shown in Figure 2. The other routes included using such tools as Rufus and WinBootMate, and even the official MoSetup workaround that Microsoft tucked into the Registry.

Perplexity answers a question about installing Windows 11
Figure 2. When I asked how to install Win11 on a machine that doesn’t meet the requirements, Perplexity gave me links to 10 webpages and five videos. But, importantly, it also gave me specific instructions on how to install the OS in five different ways. It cautions users that Win11 may have performance and stability issues on unsupported hardware.Source: Perplexity search result

Perplexity’s search-results page also enabled me to generate three images of the Win11 installation process, using DALL-E 3. Such chatbot-generated images would be helpful if, say, I wanted to post something to social media about the alternative installation methods.

If you’d like to see the complete answer for yourself, use the “search result” hyperlink in Figure 2’s caption. Perplexity encourages users to share its result links as a form of viral marketing.

The empire strikes back: ChatGPT has just launched its own search engine

As if on cue, the 900-pound gorilla that is OpenAI announced its own search engine as recently as October 31, 2024.

The new service, known imaginatively as ChatGPT Search, is initially available only to paid ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers, in addition to some OpenAI waitlist users. “We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months,” the announcement says.

I coughed up 20 bucks to get a month of ChatGPT Plus. The signup funnel is hard to find. Start from the ChatGPT instruction page, register and/or upgrade to paid, then sign in and click the tiny “globe” icon in the input box.

When I presented ChatGPT Search with the query in Figure 2, OpenAI’s technology also suggested five ways I could do the job. But the instructions weren’t as detailed as Perplexity’s. Worse, the service displayed only a small icon at the bottom of the page, bearing a few links to other sites — where I could double-check the directions before I actually subjected a working machine to them — and no links at all to instructional videos. Huh, some search engine!

When I posed the same question to Google, it gave me links to two Microsoft pages, seven other websites, and three videos. But instead of leading with a summary of the correct answer, Google’s results page started off with an alarming message: “Can’t generate an AI overview right now. Try again later.” What, Google’s bot needed a cigarette break?

In reality, Google has been showing its AI overviews a lot less often due to a “disastrously embarrassing launch,” as the Futurism blog reports. An overview was displayed in 84% of search results earlier this year, but in fewer than 15% today, according to a study by search-engine optimization firm BrightEdge. Until Google somehow fixes its overviews, you may never see one.

I could also have asked Gemini, Google’s “preview” chatbot. But that bot requires that you either register with Google, buy Google Workspace (where Gemini is “free for 14 days”), or download a mobile app. By comparison, Perplexity is open to anyone who visits its website.

There are many attractive features of Perplexity. Let me enumerate a few of them here:

  • It searches the Web for up-to-the minute information. ChatGPT can also search, but the chatbot is primarily limited to its “training dataset.” There’s a hot debate among coders about whether the cutoff date is September 2021 (as some versions of ChatGPT will tell you), April 2023, or something else, as described in a Ycombinator post. Yes, you can search the Web from ChatGPT-4o, and the new ChatGPT Search can scour the Web in real time. But the search results apparently need more work to be ready for prime time.
  • No ads. There’s nothing wrong with online ads, as long as they’re for legitimate products and are unobtrusive. (No blinking, floating, or autoplay ads, thank you.) But it’s often hard to sort through Google’s many sponsored links and find independent information. Perplexity displays no ads, being supported so far by subscription revenue and mucho cash from its investors.
  • Licensed to scrape major publishers’ websites. When Perplexity first launched, its executives argued that scraping content from the Web, and summarizing it in snippets, was “fair use,” a major exception to copyright protection. When journalists objected, the firm started a Publishers’ Program, which offers a double-digit revenue share and free access to its LLM API. Early adopters include Time, Fortune, Entrepreneur, WordPress, and others. Introducing ads to Perplexity may someday enlarge this revenue share.
  • Not everyone is on board, however. Publications such as Forbes and Wired Magazine have ordered Perplexity to stop crawling their sites. The New York Post and Dow Jones & Co. (the publisher of The Wall Street Journal) filed a lawsuit against Perplexity last month for copyright infringement. And The New York Times has sent the firm a cease-and-desist letter, while simultaneously suing OpenAI and Microsoft for training ChatGPT on Times articles (Wikipedia). This may all sort itself out; we’ll have to wait and see.
  • Perplexity can tell you its pros and cons versus ChatGPT. When I asked the answer engine itself, it replied: “Perplexity AI is generally better for research, fact-checking, and obtaining up-to-date information with sources, while ChatGPT excels in creative tasks, conversational interactions, and versatile problem-solving. The choice between the two depends on the specific use case and whether accuracy or creativity is prioritized.”

Perplexity provides accuracy, while its competitor’s benefit is just creativity? Ouch! Tell us how you really feel, Perp!

Search isn’t a service, it’s a business

I’ve already mentioned some of the costs of using these chatbot tools. The prices of each entity are malleable and seem to change by whim. At the risk of being a day late and a dollar short, here’s my overview of what you might pay for the “big three” chatbots:

  • Perplexity’s free version gives you unlimited queries and five Pro queries per day. Free queries are fast, with basic search capabilities based on GPT-3.5 and Claude 3’s Haiku model. For $20 per month, you get 600 Pro searches per day. Pro searches generate more extensive results from several different models. These include Llama 3, Mistral Large, Claude 3’s Opus and Sonnet, and GPT-4/Copilot. (The latter two chatbots usually require separate payments, as discussed below.) I myself pay for Pro access, which I’ve found is well worth it.
  • ChatGPT-4 Plus, OpenAI’s premium plan, may soon increase from its current $20 per month. A financial-disclosure document for investors reveals that OpenAI is burning cash and plans to raise the rate to $44 by 2029, according to a New York Times report last month.
  • Copilot premium access is available with a subscription to Microsoft 365. That’s $70 to $100 per year for households, $6 to $22 per user per month for businesses. Copilot adds a cost of $360 per year for businesses (pricing page). Various deals are available, however.
Perplexity is no backyard-garage startup — it’s already worth $8 billion

In case you fear that Perplexity is a flash in the pan that could fold tomorrow, take heart, pioneers. The firm has a solid financial footing and is something of a darling among observers of “unicorns” (firms worth over $1 billion that haven’t yet gone public).

The company’s origin story is almost as interesting as the technology itself. Give a listen.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity. (Photo at left from the Discovery Daily Podcast on a Perplexity webpage.)

As a young man, Srinivas graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India. After moving to the United States, he landed a job as an intern at OpenAI in 2018. This was followed by internships at Google’s DeepMind lab in London and at Google’s HQ in Mountain View.

Frustrated with his “mere” engineering degree, Srinivas completed a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021. He went back to OpenAI, this time as a research scientist on LLMs. But he walked away from the “open” firm in August 2022 to co-found Perplexity with other AI experts from Facebook, Quora, and Tower Research Capital.

Based in San Francisco, Perplexity launched for public use in December 2023. Back then, it served only about 2,500 queries per day. By January 2024, the company was valued at just $520 million.

Today, the answer engine serves more than 15 million queries per day and generates revenue of $50 million annually. The company is in talks with investors for its third funding round this year — a sizzling rate of capital infusions, according to a Wall Street Journal article. That would value the firm at $8 billion. The company hasn’t filed an IPO (initial public offering) to sell shares, but when that occurs, Srinivas will own an undisclosed percentage of them. Nice work, if you can get it!

Of course, all that money pales in the face of OpenAI’s $157 billion valuation. (The company occupies the financial stratosphere with AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Uber, and the like.) But any competitor that ignores Perplexity will regret it.

The answer engine’s share of queries more than doubled from 2.7% in January 2024 to 5.5% in September 2024. Meanwhile, ChatGPT’s share fell from 76.4% to 73.8%, and Gemini’s dropped from 16.2% to 13.6%, according to a First Page Sage analysis.

Perplexity is definitely a growth story to watch. Google was once a startup, too, and look what a giant it turned into.

The choice is yours, and I won’t say it’s an easy one

Unfortunately, as much as I like using Perplexity — and marveling at the detail of its explanations, as though it recently completed a book on the subject — it may or may not be for you.

You can’t try every chatbot, so I suggest you experiment with the free version of Perplexity and see whether its novel approach to “organizing the world’s information” appeals to you. Don’t forget to slide the Pro button to the ON position, in order to get the deeper analysis that the answer engine is capable of.

Warning: There’s a delay of a few seconds before the more-sophisticated Pro version of the summary shows up. But I just take a sip of coffee and enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the answer almost before I asked the question.

If that intro doesn’t work out for you, well, Yahoo still has a search engine — and, as the company’s founders said when they first set up their website, You Always Have Other Options.

Talk Bubbles post comment button Contribute your thoughts
in this article’s forum!
send tip button Do you know something we all should know?
Send your story to Brian in confidence!

The PUBLIC DEFENDER column is Brian Livingston’s campaign to give you consumer protection from tech. If it’s irritating you, and it has an “on” switch, he’ll take the case! Brian is a successful dot-com entrepreneur, author or co-author of 11 Windows Secrets books, and author of the fintech book Muscular Portfolios.


ADVERTISEMENT
Sell Electronics


Here are the other stories in this week’s Plus Newsletter

WINDOWS 11

Lance Whitney

How to add all types of accounts in Windows 11

By Lance Whitney

Need to juggle more than one account in Windows? Here’s how I do it.

I use a Microsoft account to sign in to my main Windows 11 PC. But that’s not the only account I’ve set up on the computer. I also have a domain account that I use for work, accounts for email and calendar appointments, an account for an old email forwarding service, and an account for my wife to sign in. That sounds like a lot to juggle. But after the initial setup, I can access all these accounts throughout Windows.

Maybe you also need to work with multiple accounts in Windows 11. You might have a local account, a Microsoft account, a work or school account, accounts for specific apps, and accounts for other family members. Whatever types of accounts you use, you’re able to add them to Windows — all from the same place.

MICROSOFT 365

Peter Deegan

Microsoft 365 gets “Copilot Lite”

By Peter Deegan

Microsoft is offering big changes to Microsoft 365 Family and Personal plans, which may eventually mean price increases for all customers.

It’s a trial balloon which, if profitable for Microsoft, will be rolled out globally. Let’s look at the important limits on the Copilot feature, along with the significant rise in price. And I’ll also explain why it’s an opportunity for many AskWoody readers to lock in the current Microsoft 365 price and thus save some money.

ON SECURITY

Susan Bradley

You clicked on that phish?

By Susan Bradley

It happens. You fell for it. You clicked on something you shouldn’t have. You followed a link. You entered your password on a site that wasn’t legitimate.

In these instances, you didn’t suffer an intrusion to your computer. Instead, your login credentials were impacted. What should you do?

First, don’t panic. In the case of many attacks these days, your operating system is still intact — not impacted in any way. The once standard reaction “I got hacked, so I’ll restore my computer from a clean backup or reinstall from scratch” probably isn’t necessary. In fact, it may be irrelevant to your response.


Know anyone who would benefit from this information? Please share!
Forward the email and encourage them to sign up via the online form — our public newsletter is free!


Enjoying the newsletter?

Become a PLUS member and get it all!

Plus membership

Don’t miss any of our great content about Windows, Microsoft, Office, 365, PCs, hardware, software, privacy, security, safety, useful and safe freeware, important news, analysis, and Susan Bradley’s popular and sought-after patch advice.

PLUS, these exclusive benefits:

  • Every article, delivered to your inbox
  • Four bonus issues per year, with original content
  • MS-DEFCON Alerts, delivered to your inbox
  • MS-DEFCON Alerts available via TEXT message
  • Special Plus Alerts, delivered to your inbox
  • Access to the complete archive of nearly two decades of newsletters
  • Identification as a Plus member in our popular forums
  • No ads

We’re supported by donations — choose any amount of $6 or more for a one-year membership.

Join Today buttonGift Certificate button

The AskWoody Newsletters are published by AskWoody Tech LLC, Fresno, CA USA.

Your subscription:

Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. AskWoody, AskWoody.com, Windows Secrets Newsletter, WindowsSecrets.com, WinFind, Windows Gizmos, Security Baseline, Perimeter Scan, Wacky Web Week, the Windows Secrets Logo Design (W, S or road, and Star), and the slogan Everything Microsoft Forgot to Mention all are trademarks and service marks of AskWoody Tech LLC. All other marks are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

Copyright ©2024 AskWoody Tech LLC. All rights reserved.