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Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

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Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#131

Post by jwrallie »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…

More or less the same experience, I used to recommend it to others, and observed a steady decrease in performance over long periods of time, smooth enough that it took a while for it to register.

I am just about to end my free trial, it lasted 12 months for the educational version which does not have any credits for Computer, I just canceled it on the webpage and it says it is going to be canceled at the day my renewal would happen. I’m observing closely.

Perplexity promised me this plan would be 5 USD once it finishes, the interface say they will bill me for 20, supports tells me not to worry, but I’m afraid it’s just a bot. I trust my instincts.

Regardless of price, I decided to cancel. Assuming 5 USD was a real promise, that looked like a great deal on paper, but I had a hunch that something is not good once they locked me out for generating images after a couple of tries, but I’ve been able to do so in the past, so I compared it with the free tier of Gemini and had more luck with image generation on the latter. The webpage is also really slow on Safari after a couple of exchanges.

What killed my interest was that I compared the search results and deep research on a couple of queries with ChatGPT Go, and I found that the search results were worse on Perplexity, while the deep research reports looked better superficially but, on close inspection, collected older information from fewer sources.

No comments on Computer, I’ve heard good things but didn’t receive credits for trying it, it’s probably outside of what I want to pay.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#132

Post by jwrallie »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #15
Aurornis wrote: post #8

I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…

If they had some sort of tier that was like $5 to $10 and the main thing it had on it was their custom model for research, no other model, I might re-subscribe, but they were definitely burning way too much compute trying to give it away in the hopes others kept their subscription. I was using it to trim down on my direct Claude Compute usage since they ran me unmetered for a while. I would draft a development plan w…

I suggest comparing the search results with other providers for your own usage, I’m not convinced myself that even at 5-10 USD it would be worth it, and I was doing the comparisons using the better models on Perplexity.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#133

Post by thephyber »

mstaoru wrote: post #47

Well it's not only this, or protection from LLMs training on LLM output. LLMs training on human output is also problematic. I was traveling to an obscure small town, doing some "research" with LLMs beforehand. Every and each one told me enthusiastically to go to "Foobar square" (name changed) for the "best street food in XYZ town", some added a lot of colorful details. There was no Foobar square in XYZ town. There wa…

Your one example doesn't make all of LLMs a lie.

It's like someone reading a National Enquirer article about "Hillary Clinton being an alien from outer space" (a real headline topic from decades ago) and drawling the conclusion that all journalism is "a lie". The user has to understand media literacy and be at least a little skeptical of the claims that are made, then cross reference with another source.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#134

Post by andytratt »

yes this is going to be the new standard. this is why i built Hari.Computer lol

you heard it here first. entropically reverse engineered sites for LLM brain is the only path forward now that high agency and intelligence matter more than morality itself.

ask Hari.Computer or your favorite chatbot what hari thinks (gemini, grok, whatever) if you don't understand what i mean by "intelligence matter more than morality itself"

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#135

Post by Razengan »

SoftTalker wrote: post #54
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something like this: 1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about. 2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question…

And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query. Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.

Can we just ban advertisements and "marketing" at a political level please?

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#136

Post by thephyber »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly. Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see…

> Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results

Imagine all of the blast radius to society if this type of incentive is reproduced everywhere. Police searches through Flock databases, matches for hiring candidate resumes, organizing targets in a war with Iran, etc.

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#137

Post by nickphx »

tencentshill wrote: post #70
locknitpicker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's all because of ads. Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy. If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...

Ah nice, the site uses nextjs/vercel and is hosted by AWS ...

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#138

Post by gxs »

SoftTalker wrote: post #54
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something like this: 1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about. 2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question…

And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query. Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.

The sad thing is this is unavoidable, or will be for a long time

Look at cable tv - even after going premium, you eventually wound up paying for ads anyway

In that case, you could make the argument that you could still purchase premium channels like hbo to avoid ads, but the internet doesn’t work that way - you depend on all the content generated by those ad funded channels

You could argue that Netflix changed that, and that’s why I said won’t change for a long time. I don’t think anyone’s discovered the business model yet that will keep content free for consumers while still generating revenue for companies

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#139

Post by xyst »

xpct wrote: post #18

If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated we…

Bots trained on trash data, then produce trash. Why are we surprised here?

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them

#140

Post by jbeninger »

sodapopcan wrote: post #96
keeda wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG if this is true, do you realize what this means? The easiest way to do AI SEO is to generate all your content with AI, and we've seen what SEO does to the web... The Internet is doomed. Time to start some human-only darknets.

SEO is what ruined the web AFAIC. > Time to start some human-only darknets. I know very little about darknets. How could you ensure that they are human-only?

Lose anonymity and bring back key-signing parties. Maybe you can't guarantee that everything is human-generated, but at least you know the chain of trust that leads to the human that signed off.

Yes, I'm aware of the irony of creating a darknet that only works by removing anonymity.

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