What Does AI Know About Me?

Back in my teaching days, when having my students analyze search engines, I used to suggest that one interesting exercise was to Google themselves and see what resulted. Of course, this was back before Google became, as Cory Doctorow so eloquently put it, “enshittified.”

This week, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols had an interesting article entitled “Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine.”

This article outlined a significant shift in the search engine landscape, particularly focusing on Google’s declining effectiveness and the rise of AI-powered alternatives. Vaughan-Nichols, drawing from decades of experience with search technologies, explained how Google’s increased prioritization of advertising revenue had compromised its search quality, with first-page results becoming cluttered with ads and potentially inaccurate information. This decline coincided with Google’s dropping ad market share, which has fallen from 34.7% in 2017 to an estimated 28.8% in 2024. Notably, he quoted Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, who predicted that AI could cause “total disruption” to Google’s business model, as AI technology could eliminate the Search Engine Result Page where Google generates most of its revenue.

He particularly noted that the emergence of Perplexity as representing an innovative advancement in search technology, offering features that could fundamentally transform how we approach information retrieval in educational and professional contexts. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that simply provide answers (which are often unreliable) without supporting evidence, Perplexity’s distinctive advantage lay in its transparency – it provides both AI-generated responses and verifiable sources alongside them, enabling users to validate information and conduct deeper research. This combination of natural language processing capabilities with source verification potentially creates a more accessible yet rigorous search experience, which could make it a valuable tool for both casual users and serious researchers who need reliable, ad-free search results with clear attribution.

Interesting, indeed!

So I decided to try out Perplexity with a subject I know pretty well … me!  I typed in “Britt Watwood” and I have to admit, I was amazed at the results.

This was pretty accurate.  If you Google “Britt Watwood”, you get a bunch of links, some of which are no longer valid.  DuckDuckGo also has links, but they appear more relevant and up to date, such as starting with my info on LinkedIn.  The only error here in Perplexity in the above was that I have now fully retired and am no longer teaching for Northeastern or Creighton.

I was really fascinated by the drop down boxes at the bottom.  I also found that some of the results were off.

First, this was not a “book”, but rather a presentation I did with Alexandra Hilosky at the Chair Academy annual conference in 1997.  The insights, however, are pretty accurate to my thinking at the time.

As to my military background, I found it interesting that Perplexity did not hallucinate or make up an answer, noting instead that it had insufficient data to formulate an opinion.  I saw that as a PLUS!

Equally interesting was it’s take on my examples of work, which it drew primarily from my blog:

So all in all, I was impressed with how Perplexity viewed “ME”.  I have bookmarked this search engine and intend to try using it (and contrasting results with Google) in the coming weeks.

Any impressions from you on Perplexity?  I would be interested in hearing from you!

{Graphics: DALL-E}