I just tried Perplexity's new page feature - Wikipedia should be worried

I just tried Perplexity's new page feature - Wikipedia should be worried

Artificial Intelligence search startup Perplexity has launched a new feature that makes results more sticky and allows users to turn their research into a page that can be easily shared.

The

page is built on Perplexity's existing AI-powered search capabilities, which use a system similar to Google to catalog websites, but are combined with AI for analysis and display. 

This is a similar but more chatbot-like format to the badly criticized Google AI overview. It is also an excellent chatbot in itself and is also on my list of the best ChatGPT alternatives.

On page

, you ask questions and set your target audience, and Perplexity parses the billions of web pages it indexes and uses AI to match the results. Instead of just responding and replying to your message in the chat window, it turns it into a target page.

This was a worrying new concept as journalists paid to create content pages on my professional topic. Still, all the information on the new Perplexity page is quoted and contains links to the original source — there are often opinions and research articles by people like me.

The new Perplexity page feature is accessible from the library. You can then click to add a new page, thread, or collection. With the new page, you give it a topic, set the audience, and let the embarrassment ride on its research.

I tried it by creating a page for the Civilization series of games. I've been playing Civ in some way since I got it in the Amiga600 on my 11th birthday in the early 90s

and it was very easy to set up. You give it a topic and it creates an overview page. You can then add a header image and a new section. Each section is generated from a search query.

Bewilderment told me that it was essential to source information and citations. "Each section allows you to view the source of that content, so you can always return the information back to its original context," the spokesperson said.

They go on to say: "When you delete a source, that section is rewritten to no longer contain information from that source."

Bewildered, using search in Google Gemini and ChatGPT is its temporary content. If you search and answer it provides and someone else requests a response, it will be a slightly different thing.

On page

, you can create pockets of specific information generated by AI and create citations to actual surveyed Internet sources in a way that can be easily shared.

This poses a challenge to Wikipedia — which itself provides a lot of source material for the pages being generated — so that people can just go straight to the perplexed page for more information. 

But as the company points out, its value is in quotes, with links to every page. Therefore, as long as Wikipedia or other sources continue to be updated, it will always get links from perplexed pages.

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