A new company could aim to dethrone Google as the search king: report

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Fox News

The way people search for information online could soon be changing as artificial intelligence continues to advance, and with it a new company could dethrone what has long been the king of online searching.

 

"It’s certainly conceivable that AI could ultimately replace search, especially if AI can learn what its user wants and deliver more relevant responses," Jon Schweppe, the Policy Director of the American Principles Project, told Fox News Digital while cautioning that there are still a lot of unknowns with the technology. "We are in the nascent stages of the AI revolution and it’s still not clear that these companies know how to monetize it."

The comments come as new search product called Perplexity has quickly become one of the most talked about platforms in technology, with an AI-driven search function that rivals or even bests traditional search platforms such as Google and Bing, according to a report from the New York Times.

The company, which is a year old and was founded by people who previously worked in AI research at OpenAI and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been the benefactor of a boom of investments in recent months. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also was an early investor in Google, is one such investor in a round that saw the company bring in $74 million and brought its total value to $520 million, according to the report.

 

The report notes that although the interface of the landing page has many similarities to Google, the user experience is much different and in some cases better than traditional search. One feature noted was Perplexity's "Copilot," which asks a user clarifying questions that help narrow down the search instead of presenting pages of possible results.

Jake Denton, a Research Associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center, told Fox News Digital that issues with current search engines could open the door for companies such as Perplexity to take over the top spot in the industry. Among those issues is a desire to filter or censor results, Denton argued, denying users the information they were actually looking for.

"That's why startups like Perplexity are taking a totally different approach - giving people unfiltered results without the usual Big Tech manipulation," Denton said. "Perplexity already outperforms browsers like Google in so many areas because they're focused on quality and accuracy, not this top-down censorship and control of information."

But not everyone is convinced the technology will truly be able to take over search.