Perplexity is better with Magicdoor

Perplexity is a great search engine that in many ways outperforms ChatGPT. It has replaced probably over 50% of what I used to use Google for. But as a writing tool and general assistant, I never really liked it. It has a number of other quirks and weaknesses that Magicdoor fixes.

Perplexity is not the best at writing content

It's very easy to answer quick questions with Perplexity, and the answers are often very good and remarkably accurate. But when it comes to writing, Perplexity is not great. The makers have optimized it so heavily for search that it has certain annoying habits. It will search for sources no matter what, which is often not what you want when writing. It is also very much focused on answering, instead of creating.

To beat back factual hallucinations, all the creativity has been beaten out of it. It doesn't matter which model you select in the Perplexity interface, these problems are always there.

It can be difficult to copy/paste content out of Perplexity

Something about the way Perplexity renders content makes it difficult to select and copy/paste content. It happens often that you get weird additional line breaks, or a lack of them. Or that the copied content comes out in markdown when pasted into Google Docs. The content also comes out with Perplexity's background color (a sort of beige). It's quite an annoying extra bit of work to have to remove the background color and reformat everything.

Perplexity won't work with VPNs

This is a huge pain if you're in a country with strict internet censorship or simply in a bar or hotel with public wifi. Perplexity won't work with VPNs at all, blocking you from accessing the service.

Perplexity's image generation UX is weird

Unlike ChatGPT and Magicdoor, Perplexity won't just generate images when you ask it to. You have to go to a separate tab to generate images. The images also somehow are never as good as the ones you can get from other tools.

Magicdoor fixes all of these issues

Magicdoor allows you to use Perplexity's Sonar models directly. But even more powerful is that Magicdoor enables you to use GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet without the strong Perplexity training to make it better at search. These general purpose assistants will then make a call to Perplexity's API to get a factual, accurate answer only when needed. This is the best of both worlds in one place. And if you were to buy Perplexity Pro and ChatGPT Plus, you'd be paying $40 per month. Magicdoor is $6 per month + your actual usage.

A typical quick question like: "What is the capital of France?" will be answered simply by GPT-4o from its training data, but for a question like: "what is the latest news about the war in Ukraine?" GPT-4o will automatically use Perplexity to get the most accurate and up-to-date answer.

The combination is remarkably good at figuring out what you need. For example: the lazy and wrong question: "When does the blue lotus Thailand season come out and on which service?" got the answer: "The series you probably meant is called "The White Lotus", and the third season, shot in Thailand will be available for streaming on HBO from 16 February 2025."

Impressive, right?