AI search

24 November, 2024 - Tags: ai, search

TLDR: This blog is summary of me using firefox developer edition fully from start of 2024 and then later from september moving away from google search to AI assisted search engines.

Browser History

At the start of 2024, I made a decision browsing hackernews. I remember one day on the front page of hackernews, there was a trending article with the title In 2024, please switch to firefox

In 2023, I used a mix of chrome and edge. Edge mostly because microsoft started adopting new features like splitting, read aloud, workspaces etc. I almost had all the three browsers (chrome, firefox and edge) installed all the time on my computer. In 2024, right from 1st January, I deleted chrome and edge from laptop and made a decision to use firefox developer edition.I could have used firefox but the decision to use developer edition was mostly inspired from watching Jon Gjengset rust streams.

Fast forward till September, I was using it perfectly fine. I also had to install chrome for backup because sometimes during google meet the voice/sound becomes an issue. It happens almost once a month so it's not really frequent.

With the search defaulted to Google in firefox, I used the same for starting 9 months of 2024. In September, I made a switch to using AI search instead of defaulting to google.

I was already doing that but previously it was mostly two steps process:

  1. type pplx.ai
  2. search for what you want

After a while, I wanted this to be the default, going through the pain of first opening perplexity and then typing the search query was getting harder. I was a little bit impatient too.

I went through some stackoverflow answers that lets me enable custom search engine in firefox.

After going through that, I added the following:

Now, my search is defaulted to @pp meaning perplexity is the default search engine and the biggest reason for that was because perplexity gives external links/references as well and I like that.

Claude also allows you searching through query params but they don't allow it without login. If I want to search "how to do something in x?" using claude then I type "@cl how to do something in x?" in my browser.

I almost never use chatgpt these days even after having access to the latest paid featuers mostly because I want to have those external references and chatgpt doesn't outputs it by default.

Claude artifacts announcement was also good and after that I started using a little of claude as well given it at least gives me those diagrams and seems to do a little bit of analysis when I search for some hard question/enter a error log.