While the world is in heated debate over handling media articles and original reporting, Perplexity, the AI-powered search startup, displays answers to factual questions such as the weather or time at a place, currency conversion, and simple math query answers right through cards. This is an effort to make those using Perplexity for such answers not go to some other search engine like Google.

Simply put, Perplexity could already be bringing this information via the web and giving results in a descriptive manner, but the company is adding some visual flair to these results so that they are more front-and-center and quicker. In a statement on X, CEO Aravind Srinivas said basic queries now should work fast on the search engine.

Some nice gradient and parallax work here from our design and mobile teams. https://t.co/MIIrjW8Dz6 pic.twitter.com/n4O36SRA0P
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) June 14, 2024
Notably, Srinivas said last year that Google handles basic queries like weather, time, and live scores for sports pretty well and his company had a lot of work cut out. While Google shows a ton of card-based info, including sports tournament tables and basic movie information, Perplexity also moves in the direction of showing direct results rather than fetching from other sources.

google is still better than perplexity for weather, time, live sports scores, and directions. So long way to go with this.

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) July 9, 2023
For these new search results-like weather information and currency conversion-Perplexity does not link sources. Last month Srinivas said the search startup was working with a firm known as Tako-a visualising information AI search-engine-to list information such as stock prices.

An answer engine should be able to answer basic facts about anything; but not just get back to you with long summaries. High density units of information are essential. We have been working together with folks at @TakoViz on going further with knowledge cards and… pic.twitter.com/LRCpSnhhLs

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) May 21, 2024
Perplexity was criticized by the press earlier this month, when Forbes executive editor John Paczkowski highlighted that the search engine displayed Forbes's original paywalled reporting about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt's drone company in search results without the appropriate attribution and almost identical writing style in Perplexity's newly released Pages feature. Forbes said its reporting was also featured prominently in Perplexity's AI-generated podcast.

The argument from numerous critics is that without proper credits and adequate reciprocal link-back traffic, AI-powered search generating (or re-generating) media content will choke the business of publications.

Last week, the chief business officer of the Amazon-backed startup told Semafor that the company was already in discussions with media outlets for revenue-sharing deals. Those deals will let the publishers receive recurring income.