When you want to look something up on Google, finding the right information among dozens of links can take hours. Which source is reliable, which information is up to date, and which pieces are just content written for the sake of SEO? AI research tools solve this problem at its root. They synthesize information from sources and give you a direct answer.
Over the past year, we've used three different AI research tools heavily, both in our professional projects and in our personal research.
Perplexity: Google's AI Alternative
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine. You ask a question, and it gathers information from sources on the internet and gives you a synthesized answer. It shows the source of each piece of information, so you can trace where it came from.
I used Perplexity for a market research project. I needed to research e-commerce trends in Turkey. On Google, this research would normally have taken me a day. With Perplexity, I put together a comprehensive report in half an hour. The source of every data point was cited, and verifying those sources was very easy too.
My favorite feature is the ability to ask follow-up questions. After getting the first answer, you can ask detailed questions like how this trend differs in B2B. The research deepens like a conversation.
A journalist friend of mine uses Perplexity for news research. He can pull together a topic's background, the people involved and its chronology within minutes. Its citing of sources has been very valuable in the fact-checking process for a story.
Perplexity's downside is that it sometimes skims sources superficially. It can fall short on very specific or academic topics.
Consensus: A Scientific Research Engine
Consensus is an AI research tool focused on academic papers. When you ask a question, it finds and summarizes the relevant scientific papers and shows which way the scientific consensus points.
We used Consensus on a health technology project. Our client was developing a fitness app and wanted to back up the relationship between exercise and mental health with scientific data. When we asked Consensus, it found hundreds of relevant studies and summarized that the vast majority showed a positive correlation. This data was used in the app's marketing materials.
A PhD student friend of mine uses Consensus for literature reviews. He has cut a literature review process that used to take a week down to two days. He says it's especially valuable for quickly seeing the general scientific trend on a topic.
Consensus's downside is that it focuses only on English-language academic papers. Turkish sources and non-academic content fall outside its scope.
Elicit: A Research Assistant
Elicit is designed as a research assistant. It doesn't just find papers; it helps you structure your research questions, form hypotheses and organize findings.
We used Elicit while preparing an industry analysis for a client. We entered our research question, and Elicit found the relevant papers and presented each one's methodology, sample size and results in a table. This structured data was very valuable because it made comparing the papers easy.
A researcher I know uses Elicit for systematic review work. Its ability to automatically categorize papers and extract key findings has significantly reduced his workload.