[flybird]

You're right! This is actually one of people's concerns about Perplexity's future.

Additionally, the way I see it, running a local Perplexity alternative is not necessarily for better results, but for better privacy protection. Plus, it's cool.

[drexlspivey]

No he is not right. They don’t google stuff they maintain their own crawler and index which they query

[voidUpdate]

Who's "he"? Also you might want to contact the author of the post then, because it talks a lot about how Perplexity searches for things on Google

[barkerja]

The article is not correct. Perplexity has its own crawler and crawls sites directly.

The nice thing about Perplexity is its source annotation. It will show you in real time how it's arriving at its data capture(s), and then annotate the results accordingly.

It really is a lovely service. It has replaced the "normal" search engine for me, for most of my queries. And has completely replaced ChatGPT/Claude as it can fulfill those needs directly (and even let me choose to use one of those models).

They also have an OpenAI-compatible API. I use it in conjunction with https://github.com/thmsmlr/instructor_ex