In a recent round of financing, Silicon Valley startup Perplexity reached a valuation of $9 billion, tripling its previous valuation. The funding amount was $500 million, marking Perplexity's rapid development in the artificial intelligence search engine sector and strong investor interest. Established in 2020, the company focuses on developing AI-based search engines aimed at enhancing user search experiences. Its technology enables users to obtain information more efficiently, especially in

Brave Search announced a significant update on Thursday: the addition of a conversation mode to its 'Answer with AI' feature, allowing users to ask follow-up questions based on the initial search, greatly enhancing the coherence and depth of the search experience. The operation of this innovative feature is very intuitive. For example, when searching for 'Christopher Nolan movies,' the system first generates an AI summary that introduces the background of the director Nolan and his representative works. Now, users can ask follow-up questions in the dialogue box below the summary.

The AI Q&A platform Perplexity recently announced the official launch of its shopping feature, allowing users to shop directly through the platform and enjoy the convenience of one-click checkout and AI product recommendations. This new feature aims to enhance the online shopping experience by optimizing its search interface, helping users easily find the products they need. Perplexity's shopping feature is connected with multiple e-commerce platforms, including Shopify. When users perform product searches, Perplexity automatically aggregates and analyzes data from these sources.

AI search engine Perplexity officially launched its advertising program in the US market this week, creating a new model for search advertising. This highly anticipated AI company has successfully attracted several advertising giants, including Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG. Unlike traditional search advertising, Perplexity has innovated an advertising format that integrates into the AI interaction process. Advertisers can naturally incorporate questions in relevant contexts, such as how to use Indeed to optimize job search strategies.

After an accidental encounter at a thrift store, former Apple engineer Alex Ruber and former Twitter and Asana engineer Parth Chopra joined forces to establish the second-hand goods search engine Encore, aimed at addressing the challenges consumers face in finding desired items within the vast second-hand market. This emerging startup has successfully been selected as one of the inaugural fall startups in Y Combinator's history. The two initially met on Y Combinator's founder matching platform, and later at an event.

Just a few days after launching the new search feature, ChatGPT experienced service outages on Monday morning, leaving many users frustrated. The outage mainly manifested as the system frequently displaying error messages, especially when users attempted to use the new search feature, which was particularly severe. According to user feedback, ChatGPT's webpage often showed '404 Not Found' error messages, making it difficult to conduct searches smoothly. This issue has garnered widespread attention, with outage reports appearing on DownDetector.

As the U.S. elections approach, AI search engines are facing significant challenges. At this critical moment, major tech companies are striving to provide accurate and reliable information to address concerns about misinformation and the 'hallucinations' generated by AI content. In this competition, Perplexity AI has caught attention with its new AI Election Center. This platform offers real-time updates, incorporating data from the Associated Press and collaborating with the nonprofit voter guidance site Democracy Works.

OpenAI has launched a new feature called ChatGPT search, which allows users to quickly obtain the latest web search results through a conversational interface and provides relevant webpage links. This improvement enables users to receive timely answers directly within ChatGPT without switching to traditional search engines. ChatGPT search combines the advantages of a natural language interface with the value of real-time information, such as sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.

According to a recent report by The Information, Meta is quietly advancing an ambitious plan to develop a dedicated search engine for its AI chatbots. This strategic shift stems from Meta's deep reflection on the significant losses caused by changes to Apple's privacy policies. The search engine project has been under wraps for at least eight months. The company aims to integrate web indexing into Meta AI, thereby reducing its dependence on Google Search and Microsoft Bing.

In September 2024, OpenAI's ChatGPT achieved a milestone by surpassing Microsoft Bing in terms of traffic for the first time. This AI chatbot has seen significant growth in usage across web and mobile applications. According to Similarweb, ChatGPT's official website recorded over 3.1 billion global visits last month, a 112% increase compared to last year and an 18.7% rise from August.

Recently, the renowned media outlet The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to an AI startup named Perplexity, demanding that the company stop using its content. This news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and has drawn widespread attention. In fact, this is not the first time The New York Times has clashed with AI companies over content usage issues. Last year, the paper filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of illegally using their content while training AI models.

OpenAI has recently implemented a significant update to ChatGPT, transforming not only the user interface but also introducing a revolutionary search functionality. This update marks a shift for ChatGPT from a simple conversational assistant to a comprehensive information platform. The interface update is primarily reflected in two aspects: first, the new Canvas feature automatically opens a new interface on the right side, making it easier for users to handle long documents; second, the prompt box has been relocated to the center of the screen, aligning the overall layout more closely with search engines like Google and Perplexity AI.

AI academic search engine Consensus has completed a $11.5 million Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures, aiming to accelerate academic search efficiency. It has a database of over 200 million papers covering all fields of science and academia, supporting various search methods, including keywords, conceptual associations, and Q&A. It uses custom language models to re-rank search results, providing the top 20 most relevant entries. It integrates features like citation generation and supports integration with tools like Zotero, catering to students and researchers.