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Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas: The User Is Never Wrong. Even When They Can't Type.

By Aravind Srinivas · Investing · 1 min read

Srinivas' mom types bad queries in broken English. His first instinct was to blame her. Then he caught himself.

Key Points

Larry Page's philosophy: the user is never wrong
Google won because they handled bad queries. Excite blamed the user.
Prompt engineering is a temporary crutch -- products should let users be lazy

People are lazy. A better product should be one that allows you to be more lazy, not less.

His Mom Can't Type. That's on the Product.

Aravind Srinivas' mother uses Perplexity. Her English isn't great. She types messy queries and gets irrelevant answers.

Srinivas: "My mom is not very good at English. She uses Perplexity and she just comes and tells me the answer is not relevant. I look at her query and my first instinct is like, come on, you didn't type a sentence here. But then I realized -- is it her fault? The product should understand her intent despite that."

I look at her query and my first instinct is like, come on, you didn't type a sentence here. But then I realized -- is it her fault? The product should understand her intent despite that.

How Google Beat Excite

Srinivas tells the story of when Larry Page tried to sell Google to Excite.

Srinivas: "They did a demo to the Excite CEO where they would fire Excite and Google together and type in the same query, like 'university.' In Google you would rank Stanford, Michigan and stuff. Excite would just have random arbitrary universities. And the Excite CEO would look at it and say, 'If you typed in this query it would have worked on Excite too.'"

Srinivas: "That's a simple philosophy thing. You just flip that and say whatever the user types, you're always supposed to give high-quality answers. Then you build the product for that. You do all the magic behind the scenes."

The Excite CEO would look at it and say, 'If you typed in this query it would have worked on Excite too.' That's the philosophy thing -- you just flip that.

Prompt Engineering Won't Last

Srinivas: "Even if the user was lazy, even if there were typos, even if the speech transcription was wrong, they still got the answer. That change forces you to do a lot of things that are core-focused on the user."

Srinivas: "This is where I believe the whole prompt engineering thing, trying to be a good prompt engineer, is not going to be a long-term thing. I think you want to make products work where the user doesn't even ask for something but you know that they want it, and you give it to them without them even asking for it."

Srinivas: "People are lazy. And a better product should be one that allows you to be more lazy, not less. Products need to have some magic to them. And the magic comes from letting you be more lazy."

People are lazy. And a better product should be one that allows you to be more lazy, not less. The magic comes from letting you be more lazy.