WSWS Edition #1 - Three Perplexity Alternatives to Find Quantitative Data for Your Articles
Hello Reader, Sometimes, you just need a slight push to get started. I've been ruminating over writing a newsletter for a year, but there was always something keeping me from it - workload, family responsibilities, and, of course, imposter syndrome. Here's the piece of appreciation from Tripti Garg that finally got me off the fence and wading enthusiastically into the waters of newsletter writing.
Subscribe to her insightful newsletter, Trippy Tales, to follow her through the highs and lows of B2B writing. In this edition, I’ll address a question I’ve been asked frequently: How do you (quickly) find recent statistics from original reports and surveys?
If you’re wondering what my response to this writer was, read on. Before we start,
💡 Editor’s tip: When you start working on a project, create a database of the original reports you find during research. In all likelihood, you’ll be using it repeatedly during the course of the project. Plus, when you work in a similar niche for another client, you have a database of research ready. I used the same prompt for all four answer engines to compare the results. TL;DR: Felo.ai gave me the most relevant links. Perplexity.ai Felo.ai
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Felo.ai threw up some links similar to Perplexity - but it did give me this AI Agents for Retail e-book, this open Springer Nature research article, this Salesforce blog post summarizing the major findings of its State of the AI Connected Customer Research study, this Market Research Future report, and quite a few other market research reports, whitepapers, and blog posts.
In total, it gave me 37 sources neatly categorized by Research Reports and Whitepapers, Guides and Ebooks, and Survey Reports.
This is something Perplexity.ai did not do.
you.com
You.com was somewhat useful, too, throwing up McKinsey and Forrester articles and an e-commerce association report from Ecommerce Europe.
Similar to Felo.ai, it categorized the results into Consulting Firm Reports, E-commerce Association Reports, Academic Research, Industry-Specific Resources, and Government and Think Tank Reports.
However, it ran out of steam midway and asked me to visit industry websites and use different search strings.
exa.ai/search
exa.ai/search had to be prompted differently because of its filters - Category (PDF, blog post, paper, LinkedIn post, tweet, etc.), Publish date, Domain filter (you can exclude competitor domains here), Phrase filter, and Number of results.
I received fairly relevant results, but what was most interesting was that you could open up a summary of the page/document to decide if you want to dig in.
So, what should you do?
Experts' Corner
If you're a Perplexity Pro user, you might get better results than I did.
However, if you want to get creative and do some prompt engineering to get the most out of the free version, here is what ace content editor, Sourav Chakraborty, has to recommend:
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Today, I'll show you how Perplexity can help you deliver better content quality reinforced with relevant statistics and value-driven pointers for your typical SaaS content readership.
Also, note that the latest versions of ChatGPT can do the following action items that we are going to discuss; however, its accuracy and results are often debatable.
As you can see, this statement (from a blog post excerpt) could benefit from updated statistics.
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So we copy-paste the statement on Perplexity AI.
Note the prompt, you can try out something similar:
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In most cases, Perplexity fetches some relevant statistics that you can use.
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If not, feel free to prompt further:
From the search results on Perplexity, this is one of the most applicable pieces of information, so we are going to use it in our article.
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To make sure Perplexity results are 100% vetted, fall back on Google. Copy-paste the sentence from the Perplexity search result and find the exact source of the study.
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Needless to say, you can find several related studies on the SERP that you can use throughout the article.
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Now, the prestige:
Do not copy-paste the sentence from Perplexity. Rewrite it and make sure to humanize it as much as possible.
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And that's it for this time, Reader
Did you find this information useful?
Try out different prompts on the various tools I've explored in this edition, and let me know your results. I'll feature some of your responses in the upcoming editions.
Reply to this newsletter with any questions that you'd like me to answer in subsequent editions.
All my best,
Satabdi
Sneak peek into the next edition:
We will talk about using search operators to manually, (but smartly) search for information on Google.
Plus, we'll learn about another editor's method of combining a Perplexity search with Google search to get specific quantitative data.
Satabdi
I'm a marketer who loves to talk about marketing & branding. Subscribe to my newsletter.
Hello Reader, Did you try out any of the AI answer engines I talked about in the previous edition? In Edition #2, I'll talk about manually looking for quantitative data + combining AI tools with manual search. I've used and refined the manual process over 12 years of writing, and I still default to it rather than use a tool. (Not that you have to - I'm a bit of a content Luddite.) Here's how I do it: Google Search Operators I prefer to use search operators since it helps me find original...