Perplexity has an open-source alternative now, and I’m hooked

It pains me massively to say (well, type) this, but the era of entering a query into Google, hitting Enter, and manually opening different websites to piece together an answer feels like it’s slowly coming to an end. The way the average person looks for information online has changed considerably over the past few years, and I know you and I are both guilty of turning to AI-powered tools instead of traditional search engines every now and then. While I initially struggled to see the appeal of using chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, AI-powered search engines are a bit of a different story.

Take Perplexity, for example. If an AI chatbot and a traditional search engine had a baby, Perplexity is pretty much what you’d get. Rather than just presenting you with a list of websites, it searches the web, pulls information from different sources, and uses AI to piece everything together into a comprehensive answer, complete with citations. Essentially, it does much of the digging you would otherwise have to do manually. Though I’ve now come to appreciate how convenient Perplexity’s approach is, I’ve had my reservations about it. This is exactly why Vane, an open-source alternative to Perplexity, immediately caught my attention.

Vane is an open-source take on Perplexity

Perplexity’s DIY cousin

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