Google search has been fired from my life.

And Perplexity has been hired.

Perplexity is a crisper, cleaner, and just a better experience.

They have created a new way of gathering and interacting with data on the web that to me at least, makes Google search a dinosaur. And nearly extinct.

I told someone the other day that I had ceased using Google search in favor of Perplexity’s AI.

AI is the new search.

And Perplexity has changed the game.

All of my searches are now going through their AI.

Today, I needed help getting my iMessages to sync across devices:, so i turned to Perplexity.

And Perplexity went to work.

There are a million things that I love about how the AI responds here.

It starts out with a TLDR. It then gives me specific the step by step process to follow to solve my problem.

And finally, it weaves in a variety of sources throughout, providing credibility and transparency about how it arrived at this response.

Here is another example:

Here, I am given a summary. And then it goes into the specifics. Again, with the sources that were used to generate this response, weaved in throughout it.

Another thing that I find really impressive about Perplexity:

They have given you the ability to leverage a variety of LLM models from both their own proprietary AI and the other most distinguished LLM models currently available.

I felt confident in the answer, but wanted to understand Perplexity’s LLMs a little bit more. So I asked:

Correct! They use both their own proprietary AI models and also other AI models.

So when using their free basic chat, today that is running on their pplx-7b-online model (trained on 7 billion parameters.)

Their pro chat runs on Perplexity’s pplx-70b-online model (trained on 70 billion parameters.)

Then they give users access to DeepSeek’s R1 model. This model broke the internet a few weeks ago when DeepSeek first made it available to the public.

And finally, users get access OpenAI’s latest o3-mini model.

With these options, as a free user (which I am,) I am limited to 5 queries a day for Pro, DeepSeek, and OpenAI models.

From there, the user to has the ability to further customize how the AI functions.

I haven’t tried these customizations yet, so I prompted Perplexity to learn more.

Focus Modes sound interesting. I am intrigued.

I haven’t got outside of the default setting yet, but I am interested in trying the Academic mode. I enjoy researching the science of using food as medicine, so I am exited to put this customization to use!

The social and video focuses also sound intersting! Excited to play around with them.

Today, I noticed the customization options seems to vary across Perplexity mediums:

web based (desktop)
app based (phone)
app based (desktop)

I was unable to find all of some of these things on each of the different form.

Like the desktop app doesn’t seem to let me leverage o3-mini as of Feb 8th, 2025.

2/8, Update: Perplexity released an update to their app 2/5 and it hadn’t downloaded yet. o3-mini is now an option.

And I could not locate the Focus setting on the web based platform.

Yet, I do find it in both of their apps.

Mobile:

Desktop:

Surely, this gap gets addressed soon. It is an important customization ability.

I was serious with what I said at the beginning: Google search is a dinosaur.

The only way out is a radical change in the Google search output. Because right now, it comes out as a bunch of noise. And Perplexity gives me a clean, crisp, and easy to digest experience, without all of the noise.

But probably the most powerful differentiator, the user has the ability to deliberately tailor the instructions is gives the AI and directly impact how Perplexity behaves. And Google search does not.

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Question for the internet: how do you search in 2025?