Amid ongoing controversy over handling media articles and original reporting, AI search startup Perplexity now displays results for real-world queries like the weather and time in a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math questions directly through cards. This is a move to stop Perplexity users going to other search engines like Google for such results.
To be clear, Perplexity could already retrieve this data from the web and display results in a descriptive way, but the company adds some visual flair to these results to make them more visible and fast. At X, CEO Aravind Srinivas said these basic queries should now work quickly in the search engine.
In particular, Srinivas said last year that Google handles basic queries like weather, time and live sports scores well, and his company had a lot of work to do. While Google displays a lot of card-based information, including sports tournament tables and movie highlights, Perplexity is also moving in the direction of showing results directly instead of pulling from other sources.
For these new search results, such as weather information and currency conversions, Perplexity is not linked to any source. Last month, Srinivas reported that the search startup was partnering with a company called Tacoan AI search engine for information visualization, to display information such as stock prices.
Earlier this month, Perplexity faced criticism from the media, as Forbes pointed out that the search engine was showing search results about the original payment reports without proper attribution and with almost the same writing language in the company’s recently launched Pages feature . Forbes said its reports about former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone company were also prominently featured on its AI-generated podcast Perplexity.
The argument from various critics is that without proper credit and receiving enough link traffic in return, AI search engines that create (or reproduce) multimedia content will destroy the publishing business.
Last week, the Amazon-backed startup’s head of operations, Dmitry Sevelenko, told Semafor that the company was already exploring revenue-sharing deals with publications. He said these deals would allow publishers to earn recurring revenue.
