This company wants to dethrone Google, but does it have a shot?
As the nature of the internet evolves from something we explore with our thumbs and mouse clicks to something we talk to, and which talks back, a fierce fight for the future of search is under way.
At the Google I/O conference last week the incumbent web giant announced 100 different AI innovations to demonstrate how ready it and its Gemini chatbot are for the future. But 60 kilometres down the road from the conference, a much smaller company is working to beat Google in the race to dominating the AI search market.
Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at the self-styled AI-powered answer engine Perplexity, said Google was too big to pivot away from traditional search, and it's too bogged down in advertising.
'They built the world's most lucrative business, but it's predicated on getting you to click on certain links. And that behaviour of link clicking, especially on commercial queries, it's just going to become less relevant in the future of the internet,' he said.
'So aligning with your users, as opposed to with advertisers, that business model challenge is where Google is really going to operate with two hands tied behind its back.'
Perplexity's main product is an answer machine that navigates the web to find responses to your queries. The company was founded in 2022 by four academics who had computer science experience at OpenAI and Google, and it has received funding from investors, including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Australia is a priority market for Perplexity, which plans to grow its local user base by partnering with major Australian businesses. It has finalised a deal for the first of these partnerships, to be announced in the coming month.
Shevelenko said the company had followed a similar strategy in Japan, Korea, Germany and other countries, where overall traffic had increased by as much as 10 times following the initial partnership.
'And if there are things we need to do to make the product work better in Australia, if there's certain parts of our web index that are under-covered, we'll be very nimble and quick to adapt and react there,' he said.
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