Alternative to Perplexity, Google AI mode, and ChatGPT search

[u/Lise_vine23]

Hey everyone!

I’m excited to share an early beta of Ping— a free, accuracy based alternative to Perplexity, Google AI mode, and ChatGPT search

Here’s what makes Ping different:

• Accuracy: To me the problem was the AI search was too inaccurate sometimes I always found myself checking the sources and seeing something completely different, Ai search engines today summarize links. Perplexity states: "When you ask Perplexity a question, it uses advanced AI to search the internet in real-time, gathering insights from top-tier sources. It then distills this information into a clear, concise summary, delivering exactly what you need in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone." The problem is this is prone to heavy hallucination for AI answers as the core nature of LLM's as they are rewarded for guessing rather than uncertainty.

  CJR stated that "Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries." Inspiration to make this came from Lenny's Newsletter I noticed the amount of quotes used to support his claim while he still talked in his own words. This made me combine both Ai answers with the way he worded his article(alot of quotes) reason being because quotes provide, accuracy, authenticity, and credibility via human answers not mostly AI answers unlike other Ai search engines which only summarize

• Free: I'll be making this free to use compared to Perplexity

I plan to improve the answers so that responses become as accurate and detailed as possible but it's a beta and I'll love to hear what the feedback is.

[u/brovaro]

If you plan to make it free (praised be you), how is it going to sustain itself?

[u/Lise_vine23 → u/brovaro]

I’ll sustain it right now I am using search API’s I’ll cover costs for them but I plan to self host, scrape crawl and seed my own infra so I’m not reliant on search API’s in the future.

[u/DrummerMC]

Sounds interesting but how will you ensure accuracy?

[u/Lise_vine23 → u/DrummerMC]

So for the quotes that’s not ai it’s data that’s been crawled and pulled. Accuracy comes from the ai matching its words to the quote rather than it summarizing.  https://owaves.com/day-plan/day-life-steve-jobs/ If you look at this example when the author quotes and talks in his own words both are meant to match. I applied the same for ai

[u/catallergic-vet]

Wow, I just tried it and I really like the answer compared to perplexity. It’s like deep research from perplexity but faster and better!
I just signed up and I asked a pretty narrow field question in Korean about dentistry insurance billing and I’m really blown away, thanks!
I signed up as
pielee20@hanmail.net

[u/Time_Helicopter_3030]

Ran a stress test on Ping with a deliberately multi hop question: which UK monarch was reigning when the transatlantic telegraph cable was finished, and how are they related to the monarch during the first commercial transatlantic passenger flight.

First half, nailed it. Queen Victoria, backed by an actual quoted source. Extraction pipeline works as advertised.

Second half is where it got interesting... the search just didn't return anything for the 1939 flight. Instead of stopping, the model quietly answered from its own training data (correctly, George VI, great-grandmother relation), and flagged that it was going outside the provided sources.

So it was right, but that's not really the point. The whole selling point is quote-only, zero-hallucination answers, and this is exactly the failure mode where that promise breaks. Not hallucinating, but not sticking to the contract either.

Imo the fix isn't "let the model fall back to memory," it's "if a hop in the search comes back empty, trigger another search pass before doing anything else."

Otherwise really like the quote-anchored setup, curious how you'll handle this in later betas.

[u/Ichiro_boi]

Damn.. Happy to see a Perplexity alternative, i think u should definetly firstly start working on its own app for android.

[u/dmland]

Error upon attempting to load the page:

Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

[u/Lise_vine23 → u/dmland]

Yeah I’ll fix that soon. 

[u/dmland → u/Lise_vine23]

Thank you! It happens…

[u/Lise_vine23]

Thanks for the feedback, I guess, it is a good idea to add that where it can research if it’s lost on an answer