Perplexity's New Pages and Cybersecurity Learning
Perplexity, the “AI Answers Engine” rolled out a new feature this week, called Pages. Here’s a slice of their Intro page for it:
You’ve used Perplexity to search for answers, explore new topics, and expand your knowledge. Now, it’s time to share what you learned. Meet Perplexity Pages, your new tool for easily transforming research into visually stunning, comprehensive content. Whether you're crafting in-depth articles, detailed reports, or informative guides, Pages streamlines the process so you can focus on what matters most: sharing your knowledge with the world.
This morning I’ve been trying out Pages a little. My first couple efforts were not successful, as I didn’t choose my topic very well. I’m happier with my third try. You can set the audience for a page as Anyone, Beginners, or Experts. My first two tries were for experts, and I didn’t quite get those to play out as I wanted. This third try is set for beginners, with the aim for it to be a learning resource for myself and possibly others if I end up feeling good about it.
The topic - or the answer to Perplexity’s prompt of “What’s your page about?” - is Splunk Threat Hunting Basics. Splunk is a leader (some might say The Leader) in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space. Hijacking the term “all roads lead to Rome” lets me make an analogy here that all logs lead to Splunk (or another SIEM) - so it’s an ideal tool for monitoring system performance and detecting threats.
A few years back I had a chance to do a little threat hunting and to use Splunk, along with a few other data sources, while doing that work. I spent enough time with Splunk to become a somewhat clued up novice. And now some years have passed and I’ve likely forgotten more than I ever knew. Hence the choice of this topic for a Perplexity page for my own education and to test drive Pages, see if it’s a feature I want to keep using. My quick Saturday morning impressions are good. Here are a few reasons why:
It’s Fast - very fast in fact. You type in the what’s your page about answer and click Next and Perplexity spits out four or five articles or sections in less than a minute.
Page Cover and Section Image Options - You can have an image generated, choose from suggested images, or upload or search for an image. I initially thought you could only add a page cover image, now I’ve just gone back and added images to two of the page’s sections - the auto-selected images for both are excellent.
Sources - As you can see in the screenshots in this post, each section of a page cites its sources. I’ve been checking these and they’re solid; valid links from good sources - including several from Splunk for this page. When you’re reading a page you can click to pull up the sources:
Section Settings - I haven’t gone to town with these yet, but I have already seen my favorite option - whether to have a new section be Concise or Detailed:
So … with 20 minutes or so spent this morning, I feel like I’ve got a decent little starter page on the topic of Splunk Threat Hunting Basics. Here’s a link to that page in case any of you find that topic, or just taking a look at this starter effort, interesting: https://www.perplexity.ai/page/Splunk-Threat-Hunting-4uQ2j5VRSX.d2n7dKVtDQw
I hope that does not require any level of subscription to Perplexity.