Perplexitys Social Search Needs These 3 Features to Compete with Google

Perplexity’s regular search engine is great, but its Social Search feature leaves a lot to be desired. Before Perplexity can even think about competing with Google in this area, it needs these new features.

• Perplexity or Google better?

1. More sources than just Reddit

While Reddit is a valuable resource, Perplexity’s Social Search tool only provides results from the platform at the time of writing. This tool is useful if you want to analyze a variety of different discussions from Reddit, but it doesn’t provide a balanced overview.

Google is much better at pulling in posts from different social networks. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect; sometimes there can be too much Reddit in the search results. However, you’ll also find content from X (Twitter) — especially for live events and trending topics. Plus, some searches will pull in content from Facebook and Instagram.

2. Categories for forums and other sites

Another problem with Perplexity’s Social Search tool is that it looks exactly the same as the regular version. While the search results are different, the layout is identical.

On the other hand, Google now categorizes searches based on their origin. For example, Reddit and Quora appear under Discussions and forums on results pages.

Perplexity could stand out more by having deeper categorization. For example, it could have categories for each specific platform. This would make it easier for people to navigate the tool and find the information they want.

3. Accompanying images are better when possible

You can search for accompanying images on Perplexity; doing so is essentially using the tool's version of Google Images. This is fine, but Perplexity could really outdo Google if it focused on this area.

Google doesn't really have an equivalent; for example, you can't view Instagram images without clicking a link or going to Google Images. Some social media searches are much more image-oriented; for example, things like infographics should probably be included.