No mention of Perplexity yet in the comments but it's obvious to me that they're targeting Perplexity Pro directly with their new Deep Research feature (https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-gemini-deep-resea...). I still wonder why Perplexity is worth $7 billion when the 800-pound gorilla is pounding on their door (albeit slowly).
Just tried the deep search. It's a much much slower experience than perplexity at the moment - taking sweet many minutes to return result. Maybe it's more extensive but I use perplexity for quick information summary a lot and this is a very different UX.
Haven't used it enough to evaluate the quality, however.
Before dropping it for a different project that got some traction, "Slow Perplexity" was something I was pretty set on building.
Perplexity is a much less versatile product than it has to be in the chase of speed: you can only chew through so many tokens, do so much CoT, etc. in a given amount of time.
They optimized for virality (it's just as fast as Google but gives me more info!) but I suspect it kills the stickiness for a huge number of users since you end up with some "embarrassing misses": stuff that should have been a slam dunk, goes off the rails due to not enough search, or the wrong context being surfaced from the page, etc. and the user just doesn't see value in it anymore.
