I pitted ChatGPT search against Perplexity to see which was the best AI search engine, and the results surprised me
If you’ve been following the news from 12 Days of OpenAI, you’ll know that OpenAI has released ChatGPT search to the world as part of its Christmas-themed launch extravaganza.
This means that everybody with a ChatGPT account (you need to be logged in to use it) now gets access to ChatGPT search. OpenAI has also added ChatGPT search to Advanced Voice mode, and made it faster and better on mobile.
Previously, ChatGPT search was only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and people who had signed up to the waiting list. Now it’s available to everyone. All you need to do to use it is go to ChatGPT.com or open the ChatGPT app on your phone, tap or click on the little world icon in the ChatGPT prompt window and a blue ‘Search’ label appears, to indicate that whatever you type in next will become a web search, not a typical chatbot interaction.
Just what is an AI search engine anyway?
An AI search engine differs from a conventional search engine, like Google, in a few key ways. First, you can use natural, conversational language instead of search terms. We’re all so conditioned to using Google these days that we default to a search term-based language when we use it, and not doing that can take a bit of getting used to.
So, for example, you could start off by asking “what are the best laptops around right now?”, in the same way you would in a conversation, and then when you get the results you can follow up with “I want one for gaming” and ChatGPT will know what you’re talking about, and give you some more results.
Second, there are no adverts. Some people enjoy sponsored content links in searches, since it quite often gives you a link to exactly what you’re looking for, but you won’t find any in ChatGPT search. It very much reminds me of the early, simpler days of Google.
Perplexity vs ChatGPT
The concept of an AI search engine isn’t that new, in fact there’s another contender in the field that has been doing it for longer than ChatGPT has, and that’s Perplexity. Perplexity is perhaps the original AI search engine. From the start it was designed to search the web and find results, then give you an accessible, and conversational answer.
Now we have two AI search engines going head to head, so it’s natural to want to compare them. I picked a range of subjects to ask both about, and I was quite shocked by the results.
I started with: “I love pizza, are there any good pizza restaurants near me?”
I was a bit surprised when both search engines initially recommended restaurants that were in my nearest city, rather than local to me; however, after I told them exactly where I lived I got better results – and very similar results – from both. In fact they recommended exactly the same restaurants. What really surprised me was the amount of detail I got from Perplexity – a lot more than I got with ChatGPT search.
On web or mobile, ChatGPT’s search results appear as quite a boring text-based list. You get a simple description of each restaurant and a link to its website; that’s it. In contrast Perplexity gives you a lot more information, and it’s a lot more interesting to look, at since each result is broken down into subheadings – in this case Address, Highlights, Features and Rating. There are links to the websites, plus to the reviews online. You can choose to show all the sources in a list on the right-hand side of the page, where you also get a selection of images of the subject you’re searching for.
It was the same when I tried other searches like, “Who will be the next James Bond?”, or “What laptop should I buy for Christmas?”. The ChatGPT search results were sparse and lacking in detail, while the Perplexity results had many more links to sources, and just felt more fleshed out and informed.
My overall recommendation? Perplexity is better. Both search engines produced similar results in terms of the sources found, but Perplexity presents the information in a better way, and with more detail that makes it easy to progress your search to the next thing you’re likely to be looking for, like a review.
Sorry, ChatGPT search – you’re good, but you’re still new to this game, and Perplexity has the edge right now.