Perplexity has offered to purchase Google Chrome for $34.5 billion, even though the world’s most-used browser is not for sale. A report by The Wall Street Journal detailed the peculiar offer from Perplexity. Several parts of the offer are strange, including the fact that Chrome is not for sale. Additionally, Perplexity’s own valuation states that the company is worth around $18 billion, only slightly more than half of the value of its offer to buy Chrome.
Reportedly, large venture-capital funds have agreed to back the transaction if it were to go through, though that seems unlikely at the moment. Google has found itself on the receiving end of a DOJ antitrust case in the United States over the last few years. A federal judge ruled that Google’s payments to companies to make Google the default search engine violated antitrust law.
That ruling, which was made in June 2024, did not mandate any specific remedies to the situation. One potential solution is to force Google to sell Chrome. Perplexity already has its own browser, Comet, which relies heavily on AI. But Comet is so far behind Chrome in terms of market share that it’s unfair to call the browsers competitors.
Is Chrome for sale?
Chrome is not for sale, at least for now. Perplexity’s offer to purchase the browser was unsolicited. Perplexity has offered to make big purchases before, stating a desire to purchase and “rebuild” TikTok earlier this year. Judge Mehta, who ruled that Google “is a monopolist,” is expected to share remedies for the situation this month.
Potentially, Google could be forced to sell its Chrome browser, but that would be a massive ruling by Mehta. If Chrome has to be sold, there will likely be an aggressive bidding war by several tech giants. Chrome dominates the browser space, currently holding a 67.92% share across all devices, according to StatCounter.
The second-place browser is Safari, which is made by Apple. In most countries, any browser on iOS has to run WebKit, though that is changing. WebKit is the engine that powers Safari.
The EU’s Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow non-WebKit browsers in 2024. Recent legislation in Japan required the same change in that country, as reported by AppleInsider.
What is Perplexity?
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that gathers real-time information from the web to respond to search queries. That may sound like every search engine these days — Google and Bing have AI components — but Perplexity launched in 2022 and was a bit ahead of the curve.
For context, Bing Chat, which was later rebranded to Copilot, launched in 2023. Google Gemini came out later that same year. Perplexity brings information from several sources to generate conversational answers. As opposed to competing tools that have a chat-focused interface, Perplexity shares longer answers.
The makers of Perplexity claim that the search engine shares results that are “backed by verifiable sources,” though that claim has been disputed. WIRED called Perplexity a “Bullshit Machine” and accused the tool of plagiarizing content. Forbes has also accused Perplexity of plagiarism.
Lawsuits and accusations about plagiarism are not exclusive to Perplexity. OpenAI and Microsoft have faced lawsuits about copyright infringement in recent years.
Perplexity and Truth Social
Trump Media recently announced Truth Search AI, an AI search engine powered by Perplexity. That search engine is now in beta testing on the web version of Truth Social and Android and iOS testers should gain access soon.
Some people took to Reddit to express their thoughts on the Perplexity-powered search engine. “I’d rather bing,” said Reddit user Old_Channel44 in a thread responding to Trump Media’s announcement.
Due to Truth Social’s connection with President Trump and other politicians, announcements about the social media platform are often polarizing.
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