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Confusion is this year’s best new search tool. It uses AI to answer your questions based on online sources. You get short, relevant summaries and specific quotes. These source links allow you to verify information and dig deeper. Read on for examples, limitations, and alternatives.
- Price: Free for unlimited fast searches and five Pro searches per day. Or $20/month for 300+ Pro searches and unlimited file uploads and analyses. See feature comparison. It works on the web as well as iOS and Android.
Privacy
Confusion allows you to search secretly in many ways.
- You can search in an incognito browser tab without creating a Perplexity account.
- When you create a free Perplexity account to save your search results, you can turn on the Incognito setting to make any search anonymous.
- You can keep “data retention” off in your settings.
- Confusion analyzes only publicly available information — not paid news. And it only reads URLs when asked a related question.
What is so useful about Perplexity
- Pages: Share search results by creating customizable social pages. Watch the 1-minute video demo. For example: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing the Drums.
- Quotes: Confused provides links to its sources, so you can follow up on anything you want to learn more about.
- Brevity: Instead of long articles or lists of links, get straight-to-the-point answers in one place that saves time.
- Tip: a quick search is fine if you’re just looking for a simple fact (eg when did Jordan retire). Pro Search is best for complex queries like the one below. Toggle Pro search on or off in the search box.
- Multiple Steps to Consult Confusion breaks down complex questions into steps. It shows you the phrases it uses to make your search.
- Tip: Write detailed questions about what you are looking for. You will get better result than using keywords.
- Focus: Refine your search by specifying your preferred sources or domains to get the most targeted results. You can narrow your search to focus only on videos, academic publications, or social sources like Reddit.
- Tip: Use domain restriction to narrow your search to a specific site. Type domain:.gov to focus only on government sites. Or just use natural language to limit Confusion to certain types of sites.
- Next: Ask follow-up questions to go deeper into the topic, like a conversation. For visual topics, Confusion can display relevant images and videos.
- Collections: Group related searches into categories for easy reference and organization. I created one for Atlanta before a recent trip. You can keep a collection private, invite others to edit it, or share a public link.
Examples: When to use Confusion
- Get more information on the topic: Need research on North Korea-China relations? Ask Confusion for an overview and sources. You can then dig as deep as needed.
- Research hyper-specific information: When researching organizations that help with earthquake response, ask for a list of organizations that receive a lot of information about natural disasters. See the result.
- Explore personal interests: If you are interested in Mozart’s development as a violinist, you can request important dates and details. See the result.
More examples of search results
- Collect data: “How much debt is forgiven under PSLF in 2023 and 2024?” See the result.
- Summarize official reports: “What are the reputable forecasts of the long-term impact of Brexit on UK GDP? What are the main results of this report?” See the result.
- Check out the public opinion: “Is there a Pew study on getting news through social media?” See the result.
- Check out the historical archives: “List the literacy and education programs implemented in the most developed African countries in the past decade.” See the result.
- Discover the patterns: “Compare residential rents and housing trends in California.” See the results.
Bonus features
- The Perplexity Encyclopedia has an interesting collection of tool comparisons, such as Descript vs Adobe Audition.
- A free Chrome extension lets you invoke Perplexity search on any page. The “summarize” button doesn’t always work for me, though.
Warnings
- Image reproduction capabilities are limited. Although Perplexity can be used to create images, the feature is not prioritized in the interface. I would recommend another photo-focused service, such as Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Canva or Flux. I rely heavily on DALL-E 3 as part of my $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan, although I’m also testing Ideogram 2.0.
- Accuracy and integration: While Perplexity uses advanced generation recovery to reduce errors, it is not flawless. Always double-check information, especially data, before using it in your work.
- Real time information: Confusion is not a good source of up-to-date information. I checked it in the top stories. Rely directly on reliable journalistic sources. I Adoption section does not provide useful news summaries. As with Google News, however, it is unclear how topics and sources are selected.
- Document analysis limitations: File size limit is 25MB. For large files, try converting them to text.
- PDF limitations: When using Perplexity to analyze documents, it works best with plain text PDFs. Historical documents with hard-to-read handwritten pages or obsolete text may pose challenges.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you find the most useful sites and apps. Register here.
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