Joe Maring / Android Authority
It’s no secret that Google Search is in a weird place right now. The regular search experience has seen better days, with ads and unhelpful results making the search engine feel far less helpful than it was a few years ago. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence features like AI Overviews and AI Mode aren’t where they need to be.
Despite its imperfections, Google Search has remained my go-to search engine. But why should it when there are so many other options out there? Thinking it might be time for a change, I recently ditched Google Search and switched to one of its biggest competitors: Perplexity.
I installed the Perplexity app on my Pixel 9a, set it as the default search engine on my Mac mini, and started using Perplexity for all the things I’d normally use Google Search for. There are things about Perplexity I quite like, but after spending a week with it, I’m ready to go back to Google.
Google Search vs. Perplexity: Which do you prefer? 39 votes Google Search 79 % Perplexity 21 %
My two favorite things about Perplexity
Joe Maring / Android Authority
I’ll explain my return to Google Search in a moment, but first, I want to talk about two aspects of Perplexity that really stood out to me — the first being follow-up questions.
Perplexity is an AI-powered “answer engine,” meaning it works in the same general fashion as ChatGPT or Gemini. In addition to being able to ask more complicated questions with more natural language, you can also ask follow-up questions based on previous searches.
One day, for example, I searched “iOS 26 developer beta” to find information about its availability. I then wanted to know when the public beta would be released, so I typed, “when will the public beta be ready” as a follow-up. Perplexity understood I was referring to iOS 26 based on my first search, and just like that, I got the answer I was looking for.
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