Lesson 1: Classic Search vs AI Answer Engines No sign-up needed.
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Learn what happens when you ask an AI search tool a question. See how classic search differs from AI answer engines, how one question becomes several searches, how pages and passages are picked, how the answer and its citations are written, why cited answers still go wrong, and a short routine to check any AI search answer. No code.
You type a question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google, and instead of a list of links you get a written answer with small citations. This short course explains what happens behind that answer, in plain language, with no code. You will start by comparing classic search, which crawls, indexes, and ranks pages and leaves the reading to you, with AI answer engines that read the top pages for you and write a summary. Then you will follow one question through the whole AI search pipeline: how your question is rewritten into search queries, how query fan-out turns it into several searches at once, how pages are retrieved and ranked, why the model reads short passages instead of whole pages, and how the answer and its citations are written. You will see why AI search is a form of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on the open web, and why the model's own memory can slip into an answer that looks fully cited. The second half is about trust. You will learn six common ways cited answers go wrong, from citations that point to a page that does not say the claim, to stale or weak sources, two sources merged into one false claim, hedges dropped from a summary, and confident answers when no good source exists. You will finish with a five-minute checking routine: open the citation, find the sentence, check the date and source type, compare two engines, and know when to go back to classic search. The course is free, and you earn a free certificate when you pass the final exam.
2 modules • 5 lessons
Finish every lesson and pass the final exam to earn this free, shareable certificate.
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5 lessons · Final exam passed
Michail Ouroumis
Founder, FreeAcademy.ai
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An AI search tool rewrites your question into search queries, often runs several searches at once, retrieves and ranks web pages, picks the most relevant passages, and has a language model write an answer from them with citations to the pages it used.
No. The course uses plain language, simple diagrams, and everyday examples. Every term is explained the first time it comes up.
Not always. A citation shows which page the AI used, not that the page supports the claim. The course shows the common ways cited answers go wrong and a short routine to check them.
No. It explains how AI search works for the person asking the question. For Perplexity research workflows, see Perplexity AI for Research. Getting your own content cited by AI tools is covered in Perplexity AI Search Optimization.
About 40 minutes across five short lessons. Each lesson has a quiz, and there is a final exam with a free certificate when you pass.
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