Amidst ongoing controversy about… Dealing with media articles And original reporting, AI-powered research company Perplexity now displays results for real-world queries like the weather and time of a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math queries directly through the cards. This is a move to prevent Perplexity users from going to other search engines like Google to get such results.
To be clear, Perplexity can already fetch this data from the web and display the results in a descriptive way, but the company is adding some visual flair to these results to make them more prominent and fast. On X, CEO Aravind Srinivas said these basic queries should now run quickly on the search engine.
It is worth noting that Srinivas said last year that Google handles basic queries such as weather, time and live sports scores well, and that his company has a lot of work to do. While Google displays a lot of card-based information, including sports tournament schedules and basic movie information, Perplexity is also moving in the direction of displaying live scores rather than fetching them from other sources.
For these new search results, such as weather information and currency conversions, Perplexity is not associated with any sources. Last month, Srinivas mentioned that the search startup was working with a company called Tacoan AI-powered information visualization search engine, to display information such as stock prices.
Earlier this month, Perplexity faced criticism from the media, with Forbes noting that the search engine was displaying search results around its original paywalled reporting without proper attribution and with near-identical writing language in the company’s recently launched Pages feature. Forbes said its reporting on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone company was also mentioned prominently in Perplexity’s AI-generated podcast.
The argument from diverse Critics It is that without proper credits and getting enough link traffic in return, AI-powered search engines that generate (or re-create) media content will eat up the publications’ business.
Last week, Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at the Amazon-backed startup, told Semaphore that The company was already exploring revenue-sharing deals With publications. These deals will allow publishers to earn recurring income, he said.