Perplexity Shakes Up Enterprise Search: One-Stop Shop for Internal and Web Knowledge
In a game-changing move, Perplexity has unveiled new features that promise to revolutionize how businesses access and use information. Perplexity’s latest offerings, Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces, aim to revolutionize enterprise search capabilities by seamlessly integrating internal data with web-based knowledge.
Internal Knowledge Search is now available to Perplexity Pro and Enterprise Pro users. This tool lets companies search their own files alongside web content, all within a single platform. It’s a big step forward, as until now, these searches often required separate tools.
However, there’s a catch. The internal search only covers files that users upload to Perplexity, not entire company databases. Frank te Pas, Perplexity’s head of enterprise product, explained the reasoning behind this approach:
“We want people to bring only their most valuable data to the table. This cuts out the clutter of low-value files they usually wade through,” Te Pas told VentureBeat. “Our customers said they want to use information that really matters to them. This makes their own data even more useful.”
Right now, Enterprise Pro users can upload up to 500 files. This limit might increase in the future. The system accepts common file types like Excel, Word, and PDF.
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, highlighted the productivity boost this unified approach could bring:
“Doing research using both internal and external information used to mean using two different products. Now, being able to do all your research in one place—covering both internal and external data—will unlock huge productivity gains for every business,” Srinivas wrote in a blog post.
Several big names got early access to try out these new features. Nvidia, Databricks, Dell, and other companies have been testing internal knowledge search extensively. They’ve used it for tasks like:
- We are combining internal research notes with online news for due diligence.
- We are combining outdated sales materials with new perspectives to create proposals.
- Helping staff find benefit information
- We are gathering feedback on the product roadmap using online best practices.
Perplexity makes sure users can easily tell where information comes from. It labels data sources, showing if something came from a website or an uploaded file. This lets users dig deeper into the original source if needed.
But that’s not all. Perplexity is also rolling out Spaces, a new way for teams to share and organize their research. With Spaces, teams can:
- Share files across the group.
- Customize Perplexity’s AI assistant with specific instructions based on their data.
- Control who gets access to their information.
For Enterprise Pro customers, Perplexity takes privacy seriously. By default, AI quality training excludes all files and searches in Spaces. The company promises “the highest levels of safety and privacy.”
Looking ahead, Perplexity plans to add even more data to the mix. They’re working on integrating third-party data from Crunchbase and FactSet. This will let Enterprise Pro users who already subscribe to these services add that data to their Spaces.
Te Pas explained that this integration goes beyond just accessing these databases. If a customer has created custom lists or queries in Crunchbase or FactSet, they can also access them through Perplexity.
This approach puts Perplexity in the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. These systems typically search vast databases for relevant answers. Perplexity’s take on RAG is a bit different, focusing on the curated set of documents users choose to upload.
Perplexity isn’t alone in this space. They’re up against established players like Glean and Elastic, who’ve been offering enterprise RAG platforms for a while. Google, for example, launched its AI search chat platform last year, letting companies query their own data.
Despite the competition, Perplexity has been making waves. They’ve been taking search traffic from giants like Google. They’ve also set up a revenue-sharing program with some partners, mostly media companies, whose links show up in Perplexity searches.
As businesses grapple with information overload, Perplexity’s new features could be a breath of fresh air. By bringing together internal knowledge and web search in one place, they’re offering a simpler, more streamlined way to find answers. It’s a bold move that could reshape how companies approach information retrieval and knowledge management.
Will Perplexity’s bet on unified search pay off? Only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure – the race to build the ultimate enterprise search tool is heating up, and Perplexity just turned up the temperature.