Perplexity granted early access to its Comet browser. It offers a preview of what a truly A.I.-ified web browser of the near-future would resemble. It may make you miss some features of the old kinds of web browsers.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- If you have little experience with A.I.-ified browsers like Google’s AI Mode, then there will undoubtedly be a learning curve to using this. However, once you get used to it, there are some things that you will make you vastly prefer this browser experience to the old-school browsers.
- The Assistant feature, which is like an answer engine within the browser that you can open within a tab to ask about content in the browser, is really pretty convenient because it saves users from having to open new tabs to find out about an unknown word or concept or name or the like. If you want to deep dive it, then you can even open a new tab from the sally port.
- Where this browser really shines is when you are just looking for answers and summaries. When you are really getting into it, it feels like you are in the Internet rabbit holes that we are all familiar with, only it goes so much more smoothly.
- Really, you may wish that these A.I. browsers just weren’t so busy. On your own in a regular old-school browser may involve more seek-and-find work, but you start to realize the value in the simple.
- What looms over a lot of this is the problem of A.I. hallucination, which can be hard to detect in many cases unless you cross-reference the A.I. answer with what is in a trustworthy source. But paradoxically, that takes more time than simply finding the A.I.
The Significance for Business Owners
The writer of this blog post has never been in a self-driving car (not yet, at least…) but imagines that that experience is somewhat analogous to using this browser.
Meaning, you surrender a lot of autonomy to this browser to essentially use the search engine in a way that it believes will be fine with you.
For instance, in using the Assistant feature to summarize the three big news stories of the day, it opened tab groups for each news story, which you could collapse into one folder-like tab,
Personified Search
You can chat with the search engine, giving it your reactions to things like news summaries.
For instance, the writer of this blog post asked Comet about a recent tragic news event. After the summary that included multiple news sources, prompts were given: “That’s wild.”, “Can we talk a little bit about how scary that is?”, and “Comfort me.”
These were to test whether a user could get some chatbotty responses from Comet, and it turns out, yes. Instantly generated validations cascaded onscreen, bullet-pointed reassurances—and em-dashed affirmations.
What’s Needed: Better Multimedia Search
The Assistant feature is nice, and quite convenient in many ways. But if it is meant to be a true alternative to opening a new tab and doing a separate search, then Assistant should have more than just text summaries.
It should include links and images and even videos to browse through, because sometimes in search you are not looking for a text description of something, but visual representations of the thing.
Also Needed: Something Resembling the Old Way of Searching
A fallacy that many A.I.-search efforts seem to be informed by is that the classic way of searching—type query into search bar, get a S.E.R.P.—needs to be phased out.
But…why, exactly, does it need to be? Using Comet, there were certainly times where the writer of this blog post wished a query could simply lead to a list of links and images to browse through, with none of the chatbottery.
Being a browser, of course, you can still just go to somewhere like Google to search, but that seems to defeat the purpose of using this browser, which is meant to be like a search engine in itself.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Even if you do not have early access to Perplexity Comet, you can expect browsers like this to pop up in the near future. OpenAI is said to be developing a search engine of its own as well, so that is another major A.I.-ified browser to check out.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
Recent Comments