Google Launches Perplexity Rival, Calls it 'Learn About'

Google just launched Learn About, a conversation-based learning companion, as part of its experiments exploring several capabilities of generative AI. When Google releases the tool to the public, it is very likely that it will position itself as a direct rival to Perplexity. That's mostly because Perplexity is often marketed as the go-to knowledge discovery tool on the internet for learning deeply about topics, apart from working as a search engine to dig the web. 

Currently, Google's Learn About is available only in the United States. When you post a query in Learn About, the tool essentially helps you dive deep into the associated topic. Based on your query, Learn About provides several interactive lists and timelines regarding the topic. It also provides a quiz to test your knowledge, and other intuitive modules to clear any misconceptions.

Further, it provides tools like Go Deeper, and Simplify to further explore the topic, and you can also retrieve any related images. You can also attach an image to the conversation. The tool also lets you go down the rabbit hole by suggesting related topics and potential follow-up questions.

Largely Different From AI Overviews

While Learn About may seem like it's essentially performing the same job as a search engine, it is poles apart from what Google is doing with AI overviews. One of the limitations we observed is that Google's search results present a choice overload, by providing results in multiple forms - an AI-generated answer, a featured snippet, related search queries and the standard blue links. This is also one of the reasons why Perplexity is preferred over Google Search.

Will Google Take Over Perplexity?

Google Learn is still an experimental tool. Several features are still in development, and you can't resume existing chats once you close the tab. Perplexity, on the other hand, is on a funding spree and is set to raise $500 million, which will value the company at $8 billion.

If Google were to compete with Perplexity, they'd have to release the product soon, and it would be interesting to see if it's going to be another case where an established giant is going to eat a startup. Moreover, will this tool contribute further to copyright, and plagiarism issues between publishers and Google? Here's hoping Google's approach to extracting knowledge from the web doesn't fuel the fire.