Perplexity AI is proving to be a much better search engine than Google. It is astonishing.
For several years now, Google has been shooting themselves in the foot by trying to reform society through tainting search results. Accordingly, their search results have gone to shit. There are numerous examples of A/B tests against Google search: getting uplifting / supportive results when the female gender is the search, but getting condemning / demoralizing results when the male gender is the search. Ditto A/B test searches for Democrats versus Republicans, and Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
Okay, I’m done: I have replaced my search engine in all my browsers with Perplexity AI.
So while Google was going to shit, Large Language Models became capable. Jeff Bezos of Amazon spun up his own, trained it, and is now putting it out there as Perplexity AI. They have a commercial license for $20 per month, which is too rich for my blood. If they had a $5 per month plan, I’d pay for it now.
But currently, I’m freeloading. I do pay for Twitter, so I might start using Grok (Grok3 just came out) instead. I prefer to spread my activity over different services. Yet, I feel that freeloading is something I don’t like in other people; therefore, if I want to live a high integrity life, I shouldn’t be a freeloader. Anyway….
Today I get to do the minutes for a monthly meeting that I am Recording Secretary for.
On my Windows machine that plays nice with the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, I uploaded the recorded MP3 file to Nextcloud. It syncs to the server, and the file ends up in my folder where all these recorded MP3s go. That folder syncs to my main machine I’m working on now.
I had that moment of inspiration that finding these files / messing with the folders is more trouble than it should be. I’m in these folders a lot. Windows has a “Favorites” feature, surely KDE has such too?
Asking of Perplexity AI “does KDE Dolphin have a Favorites feature” instantly took me to a page which presented a ZD Net article “How to use KDE Plasma Places for a much more efficient desktop“. This is precisely what I was looking for, yet I had no idea that it was called Places.
This is great. Google search might have gotten me to this page eventually, but I doubt that I’d have gotten to it without going through many different page views (thereby increasing Google’s ad revenue).
And yes, I’ve asked Perplexity AI to generate a Perl program for reading a Nextcloud calendar, and it took no time at all to do it. Now, the program did not work….
But troubleshooting the problem with Perplexity AI was pretty easy. It suggested I try curl and that worked perfectly.
As it turns out, Nextcloud doesn’t play nice with Net::CalDAVTalk.
Whether this is a problem with Nextcloud (which doesn’t try to do anything on its own – it uses SaberDAV underneath) or this is a problem with Net::CalDAVTalk isn’t a terribly fruitful pursuit. What is almost trivial to do is to ask Perplexity AI to generate the Perl program without Net::CalDAVTalk. The whole thing can be done with HTTP::Request, LWP::UserAgent, and XML::LibXML.
It is astonishing how well this is working, and how quickly this change is taking place.