Perplexity vs. Google for Search

A week ago I tried switching my web browser's default search engine from Google to Perplexity.

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries using sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Wikipedia

I've seen a lot of mention in the LinkedInfluencer discourse about people switching their default search engine over from Google to Perplexity and decided to try it out myself.

I quickly discovered something about the way I use search: 90% of the time I Google, I'm just looking for a specific webpage. I rarely ask a question.

E.g. if I want to visit The Guardian's website, I'll type in 'the guardian'. The top result in Google would be their website. For perplexity, I get a lot of pointless context about the institution and its journalism and 4 links to sources, none of which are the website I was looking for.

After a few days of similarly frustrating search results, I returned to Google.

Perplexity wants to answer questions and, to be fair to Perplexity, it consistently markets itself as a research tool (rather than a search tool). If I had asked "When was the Guardian founded?", it would likely give me sufficiently good results. However, based on current web browser paradigms, Perplexity is looking for user stickiness by becoming the search engine of choice. Perplexity will need to be able to differentiate between these two modes of search engine behaviour - searching and researching - and provide appropriate results accordingly.