Using Google Search for more than just search

I use Perplexity’s Comet browser as my default browser.  I have been using it since it launched.  While the lack of syncing across devices still keeps me using Chrome for a great many tasks, when I click something that launches a browser Comet is my default.

What has been holding me back a lot, is in the search bar, I am used to typing a quick search to get to a website.  Google works GREAT for this.  Perplexity has to view it as a keyword and then do a full query and give me a response.  This is the number 1 reason I jump over to Chrome.  But no longer is this an issue, and it took having a colleague in my office to talk about this to finally realize the fix.  (It’s essentially what I did to add Perplexity as my search engine in Chrome and wrote about a while back).

How to Fix the Google Search Problem

Comet Settings - Selecting Search Engine

  1. In the very top-right of your browser, click on the down arrow next to your “avatar” (the colored circle… yea, it is another annoyance I have).
  2. Go all the way down to Settings.
  3. On the left look for Search Engine and select it.
  4. You should see the Search Engine is set to Perplexity. Click Change.
  5. In my choices, I was given Perplexity, Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, or DuckDuckGo.  I chose Google, and set it as my default.
  6. To make Perplexity easier to access, I clicked Manage Search Engines and Site Search.
  7. It shows Perplexity wit ha Shortcut of !p.  You can use that, but I clicked on the pencil icon and removed the !.
  8. Now, I just have to type p <space> and I get the perplexity search engine instead of the default Google.  I feel like I get the best of both worlds.

 

Another Alternative

After posting this over on LinkedIn, I had Joseph Rosenbaum from Synatpic Labs leave a comment that you can also hold Shift + Enter and it will use the Google Search.  This may be a better way to do it, depending on your use case.

End Result

I type anything in the URL bar, and it goes to google for search.  This is the default on how Chrome works.  I can also type p space and I get Perplexity Search. This is exactly how I had Chrome set up before, and you can go back to the link above to see how I did that.  Since both are configured in Comet, it is easier than adding Perplexity to Chrome.

If, like me, this functionality was annoying you, I hope this helps you out.