Is it a Bird, is it a Plane? No, it’s a search engine-ish?!
When you land at Perplexity coming from ChatGTP it feels completely wrong.
Instead of having Chat windows you have a search bar and we all learned using google to not enter questions in a search bar but the things we are searching.
Using the internet for 30 years plus THAT feels wrong. So, let us see what happens.
Learning from ChatGTP that you have to give these bots as much information as possible I tried another one of my brick walls.
Asking for a ship record wasn’t quite as challenging but it got the sentence structure of the question correct. The Answer in text alone however is confusing until you realize the links.
Naming the National Archives of the UK in Kew only “The National Archives” might be correct for UK citizens and specialized researchers of that topic but total beginners (especially from foreign countries that have their national archives) will frown upon such an answer.
Another thing to point out is the more detail button (which sadly is hard to find for me due to the colors the Page is using).
Clicking it results in a reformation of the Answer to include a more detailed version
This detailed response is an incredible step up from the initial one and I can not understand why they don’t use this one as the standard.
The next step would be a follow-up Question
Asking follow-up questions seems to throw Perplexity off more easily than ChatGTP at the moment, as I initially told it that my relative directly immigrated from Germany to Canada. While this is an immigration of some sort (to be correct this is called Transmigration and the same thing happens when you emigrate to Canada via Ellis Island, USA) the answer is meant for long-term immigration, not a trip through the country to catch a ship on the other side.
While Germany had (and still has) direct lines crossing the Atlantic ocean via ship these were cost-intensive so most emigrants also used cheaper routes for example the UK Route via Liverpool. You can read more about Transmigration here: https://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/transmigration.shtml
Cleaning up the follow-up question made it even worse which is surprising and ended up in complete gibberish.
You might ask yourself: why is this gibberish? Isn’t that correct? Actually, kinda. As Perplexity seems to forget the whole conversation and threat every question individually it didn’t realize that the trip goes from Germany to Canada therefore one could have immigrated via Hull AND Liverpool. The Problem thereby is that Liverpool wasn’t used for this in this context. It simply threw together an answer based on immigration, plus both places completely ignoring the context we gave in the first sentence and the whole conversation before.
Result: Perplexity doesn’t seem to interpret the sentence structure as well as ChatGTP and got confused way more often and easily in my test. It seems like Perplexity doesn’t work in instances so every question is handled in a single instance making real conversations and follow-up questions (at least in this test) impossible.
Conclusion: While Perplexity knows of sources and gives you very helpful direct links it does not understand follow-up questions (in my opinion) and therefore got very easily confused and simply wrong. I would use it only for every basic research task if ever at this point.
SidetrackedGen 