The embarrassment doesn’t just want to compete with Google, it seems to be Google.
CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one of the confusion is building your own browser and collecting all the data that users do outside of their own apps. This allows you to sell premium ads.
“This is one of the other reasons I wanted to build a browser: I want to get data outside of the app and understand you better,” says Srinivas. “Because some of the prompts people make in these AIS are purely work-related. That’s not personal.”
Also, work-related queries do not help AI companies build accurate related documents.
“On the other hand, what are you buying? Which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to? The reason you spend your time browsing is telling you more about you,” he explained.
Srinivas believes that Perplexity browser users are suitable for such tracking as the ads should be more relevant.
“We’re planning on using all the context to build a better user profile, and as you probably know, we can see some ads there through our discovery feed,” he said.
A browser named Comet has been struggling with set-ups, but is scheduled to be released in May, Srinivas said.
Of course, he’s not wrong. Quietly following users around the Internet helped Google become the market capitalization company today of around $2 trillion.
That’s why we have built a browser and a mobile operating system. In fact, confusion is also trying something in the mobile world. It signed a partnership with Motorola, announced on Thursday, and the app will be pre-installed on the RAZR series and you can access Moto AI by typing “Perpplexity.”
Bloomberg said embarrassment is also discussing with Samsung. Srinivas referenced in a Bloomberg article published earlier this month in a Bloomberg article, a podcast that discussed both partnerships, but did not confirm that it did not flat out.
Obviously, Google isn’t the only one looking at users online to sell their ads. Meta’s ad tracking technology, Pixel, is embedded in websites on the internet, but it’s the way Meta collects data, even for people who don’t have a Facebook or Instagram account. Even Apple, which sells itself as a privacy protector, can’t resist tracking the user’s location to sell ads in some apps by default.
On the other hand, this kind of thing has led people across the US and Europe’s political spectrum to distrust in the big technology.
The irony of Srinivas, who openly describes this week’s browser tracking ad sales ambitions, cannot be overstated.
Google is currently fighting the US Department of Justice. This claims that Google has acted in an exclusive way that dominated search and online advertising. DOJ wants the judge to order Google to sell Chrome.
Given the reasons for Srinivas, both Openai and the confusion are not surprising, saying that if Google is forced to sell, it would buy the Chrome browser business.