Perplexity unleashes Search API to challenge Google

[Perplexity AI, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT mobile app icons]
Robert Way

Perplexity has launched Perplexity Search API, or search application programming interface, that provides developers access to the same global-scale infrastructure that powers Perplexity's public answer engine.

The index includes hundreds of billions of web pages, updated in real time, which developers need to build new applications, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. It's the first large-scale, competitive search engine developers could use in place of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOG])(NASDAQ:GOOGL [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOGL]) or even Microsoft's (MSFT [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/MSFT]) Bing in building applications.

"When it comes to AI, context is king," Perplexity [https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-the-perplexity-search-api] said in a blog post. "It is insufficient to operate simply at the document level. Our indexing and retrieval infrastructure divides documents up into fine-grained units. These sub-document units are individually surfaced and scored against the original query parameters, allowing our API to return documents with the most relevant snippets already ranked. This means less preprocessing, faster integration, and more valuable downstream results."

Perplexity also released a new SDK, or software development kit, that shows how the startup designed, optimized, and evaluated its Search API.

In August, Perplexity made a $34.5B bid [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4484006-ai-firm-perplexity-makes-34_5b-bid-for-googles-chrome-browser-wsj] to buy Google's Chrome web browser.

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