Perplexity lets you search your internal enterprise files and the web

Enterprises can use their Perplexity dashboards to search for internal information and combine it with knowledge from the internet, but this will only be limited to specific files they deem important. 

Peplexity’s new Internal Knowledge Search lets Perplexity Pro and Enterprise Pro users search for information across the web or their internal databases. Customers can access both knowledge bases in one consolidated platform. 

However, internal knowledge bases will be limited to the files Perplexity users upload to the platform.

Frank te Pas, head of Enterprise product at Perplexity, told VentureBeat in an interview that Internal Knowledge Search will only look for information on files users have uploaded, not entire internal databases. 

“We believe this lets people bring only their most important and valuable data to the table and not the 90% of low-value files they normally sift through,” he said. “Customers told us they want to use information that’s important to them, which makes their own data even more valuable.”

Users have a file upload limit (500 for Enterprise Pro users), but te Pas said this may be expanded. Customers can also upload files directly from folders in all the popular document formats like Excel sheets, word documents or PDFs. 

Still, the company believes Internal Knowledge Search will improve many enterprise functions. 

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said research using both internal and external information used to be two separate products. One platform searches the internet and another accesses internal documents and data. 

“Being able to carry out all your research — across both internal and external sources of data — in one consolidated knowledge platform will unlock tremendous productivity gains for every enterprise,” Srinivas said in a blog post. 

Today, we’re launching Perplexity for Internal Search: one tool to search over both the web and your team’s files with multi-step reasoning and code execution. pic.twitter.com/ftZGNgziBW

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 17, 2024

Perplexity gave customers like Nividia, Databricks, Dell, Bridgewater, Latham & Watkins, Fortune and Lambda early access to the feature. During the early access testing, the company said customers used the Internal Search feature to do due diligence by combining internal research notes and news from the web, combine older sales materials with more current insights for proposal requests, help employees find benefit information and get product roadmap feedback based on best practices from the internet. 

Perplexity will also label data sources if the information was from a website or uploaded files so that the user can dive deeper later. 

In April, Perplexity launched Enterprise Pro, a paid tier of the Perplexity AI chat and search platform. The subscription offers SOC2 certification, single sign-on, user management, file upload alerts and query deletion after a week. 

Make space for Spaces

Perplexity also announced Spaces, a way for teams to share and organize research. 

Spaces will allow users to share files across a team and customize Perplexity’s AI assistant with specific instructions and responses based on their data. The company said customers will also get full control over who gets to access their information. Specific to Perplexity Enterprise Pro, all files and searches on Spaces “are excluded from AI quality training by default.” Pro customers have to voluntarily opt out of AI training. Perplexity also promises to provide the “highest levels of safety and privacy.”

Perplexity plans to add third-party data integration with Crunchbase and FactSet so Enterprise Pro users with subscriptions to those services can add data to their Spaces. 

“This will allow you to expand your knowledge base even further with the ability to search across the public web, internal files, and proprietary data sets,” the company said. 

Te Pas said that bringing in third-party databases like Crunchbase and FactSet means customers with subscriptions can also bring their personalized search queries on those platforms to Perplexity. For example, if a customer created a list of sectors to watch on either database, they can access that through a Perplexity search.

Enterprise RAG is not going away soon

Te Pas said Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces is a form of retrieval augmented generation or RAG, where users can leverage their internal ground truth to a search. 

RAG systems normally sift through databases to find the most relevant answers to queries contained within those files. Most RAG systems use large knowledge repositories, as most enterprises who want to query their own data have an extensive library of information. Occasionally, a company may deploy different RAG use cases, like a real-time information retrieval system or search-only information for a specific unit. Perplexity’s version of RAG still searches a database, except that database is one built on Perplexity’s platform by users who uploaded their documents to it. 

Perplexity has to compete with companies like Glean and Elastic, who have been offering RAG platforms for enterprises for a while. Glean launched its AI search chat platform, Glean Chat, which lets enterprises query their own data, last year.

Perplexity has increasingly taken traffic share from more traditional search engines like Google. Perplexity also has a revenue-sharing program with some partners, mostly media companies, whose links appear on Perplexity searches.