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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#251

Post by pembrook »

seanhunter wrote: post #245
pembrook wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

> They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. You know what else does this but in a non-creepy, non-tracking way that doesn't try to artificially create needs/wants in people? Accurate search results. If I want something I can search for it and find it. SEO and advertising and sponsored results are the way companies try to skew search results (usually by making them less accurate and useful f…

The problem is the best way to weight the accuracy of results (as you say, SEO exists) is with skin in the game.

A bidding-based advertising system ultimately results in the most valuable solution winning, since the ad spend will be marginally bid up as close to the value the consumer is willing to pay for the product/service minus producer input costs.

The most successful companies ultimately have the most to spend on ads. Again, this does not result in perfectly rational outcomes all the time (because humans are irrational), but comes damn close.

Now, whether we should let one company take the profits off of that ad bidding system (since it inherently trends to monopoly) is another question.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#252

Post by borg16 »

pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

i think it comes down to:

1. the majority user base does not care and/or is not willing to pay for the ads 2. these platforms/products do not want to cater to the minority that cares about their privacy and not being exposed to any advertising

Re: Perplexity got ads

#253

Post by Alifatisk »

schmorptron wrote: post #233

I'm conflicted on this. I use perplexity at the moment because they gave out a year of pro subscriptions, and it's geuninely pretty useful since it is so heavily based on web results. The one gpt wrapper product that I've liked so far. With the actual model producers now also adding web search, the question is how long they will survive and how much value they can realistically add. The third-party models are also ne…

When did they give out a year of pro subscription?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#254

Post by scarface_74 »

szszrk wrote: post #243
Ferret7446 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, they are not going to grow to the level of FANG with this approach but do they have to? They do if they want to demonstrate that paying is a viable alternative to ads, and not just a niche curiosity.

Why would anyone want to demonstrate that? Why would any small player feel the need to grow to FANG level at all? They run a profitable company that is supported by fees paid by clients. Just this alone is the proof it works. And is far, far away from the speculative nature of stock market and FANG.

They only run it off the backs of large search engines. Kagi pays to use other search engines.

That 20K subscribers wouldn’t fund them enough to make their own engine nor could they compete for the engineers to maintain it.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#255

Post by heraldgeezer »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #150
dtromero wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inline citations. I use perplexity all the time to find HackerNews or Reddit threads on certain topics, or conduct baseline research on topics. It will return the standard LLM answer but with inline citations which I can then use to verify or explore further.

Have you used ChatGPT with "internet" access enabled (the globe icon)? It can and does cite its sources and is surprisingly accurate and useful.

This is very recently free, and I find less sources than you.com or perplexity in my experience.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#256

Post by arccy »

formerlurker wrote: post #166
nomilk wrote: post #120

What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT? I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response. What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?

I do not know about Perplexity because I avoid it. Instead, I prefer and pay for Claude over Perplexity because Claude offers actual privacy protections. All other services take in my data and use it to further train their models and that does not sit well with me because I had a stalker. It’s obvious that Perplexity is following the Google route of using people as products.

so you pay them to abuse other people's privacy (how else did they train their ai) but don't want them to abuse yours...

Re: Perplexity got ads

#257

Post by gcanyon »

scarface_74 wrote: post #149
Spivak wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean 20k? I doubt they 10x'd growth since January. For a bootstrapped business whose end-goal is sustainability that's doing great. When you don't have shareholders breathing down your neck for exponential returns the calculus changes.

Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416

I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#258

Post by tokioyoyo »

ryukoposting wrote: post #250
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

Do consumers refuse to pay for search, or has nobody asked them if they'd want to? Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much. Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and phy…

No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine.

Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#259

Post by dewey »

stavros wrote: post #217
wrasee wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't he…

I run out of the 300 searches/mo in around ten days. Everyone raves about Kagi but I've paid for it around three times now, and it's never been better enough than DDG to justify the $10/mo for me...

Very different experience for me, I’ve tried to switch to DDG many times and always switched back to Google after being disappointed.

Using Kagi for a year now and only a handful of times I’ve checked if Google would give better results.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#260

Post by seanhunter »

pembrook wrote: post #251
seanhunter wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. You know what else does this but in a non-creepy, non-tracking way that doesn't try to artificially create needs/wants in people? Accurate search results. If I want something I can search for it and find it. SEO and advertising and sponsored results are the way companies try to skew search results (usually by making them less accurate and useful f…

The problem is the best way to weight the accuracy of results (as you say, SEO exists) is with skin in the game. A bidding-based advertising system ultimately results in the most valuable solution winning, since the ad spend will be marginally bid up as close to the value the consumer is willing to pay for the product/service minus producer input costs. The most successful companies ultimately have the most to spend…

If you genuinely believe that then I’m delighted for you. You are living in paradise
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