Did you know that DearMyrtle is back with her Mondays with Myrt broadcast on YouTube? If so, did you catch the session on April 22? The first half of this session was a discussion about the AI site, Perplexity, led by Terry Britton.

This session was an excellent example of why I’ve loved Mondays with Myrt over the years. She always seems to find what’s new in genealogy and the experts to talk about it. And this session was an excellent example.

While I have used AI tools, I had not heard of Perplexity prior to watching this presentation. And Perplexity has the potential to be a ‘game changer’ for researchers since it not only pulls information from a variety of sources but also tells you what sources it used.

My experience with Perplexity became perplexing when Randy Seaver shared that Perplexity found his blog posts (at 39:05) and I discovered that my blog was not found (at 42:33).

Thus, I had a problem to solve. Why was Randy’s blog found and mine wasn’t. Thanks to Myrtle’s suggestion about Blogger being immediatly indexed by Google, I copied my “Henry” post into my old blogger site. And as I’m writing this blog on Wednesday, April 24, the Henry post on Blogger is still not indexed.

From that search, I moved to Google Search Console to try and figure out why my current posts aren’t being indexed. And I discovered that my site likely had not been crawled let alone indexed

Sider

Thus, the questions: Why not? and How do I fix it? While I had been using the AI tool, Sider to transcribe newspaper articles, I started asking it questions about how to fix these indexing issues. And I found this aspect of AI gave me easily followable step by step instructions.

Thanks to the help from SIDER, I felt like I was making progress. However, I knew that changes like this can take time to populate across the Internet. Thus, I had to be patient and wait at least 24 hours.

Perplexity

Being slightly impatient, I wanted to see if I could train Perplexity to use my site. Thus, I put the address of my blog in as the ‘question’. Surprisingly, the answer is a fairly accurate description of my blog.

As I continued to investigate, I also learned more about WordPress and SEO (Search engine optimization). Unfortunately, my Henry post on both Blogger and WordPress are still not indexed.

However, I’ve continued to learn about SEO while waiting. Thus, I’ve added the Yoast plugin to my WordPress blog to help me administer SEO.

YOAST

The plugin added SEO information at the bottom of each post/page.

One of the pieces of information that Yoast manages is the ‘Meta Description’. Since I’ve never added this information to a post in the past, it may be why my posts are not getting indexed. Unsure of how to write or what to write in a Meta Description, I asked Chat GPT.

CHAT GPT

Basically, I asked ChatGPT to “write a meta description for the following” and then copied the text of the blog post into ChatGPT after the word, following. Then I copied the results into the Meta Description field in the SEO section.

In the past I’ve experimented with having AI write for me (See AI-Fiction) and was disappointed. However, I’ve been pleasantly pleased by the meta descriptions generated by ChatGPT.

Back to Perplexity

Hoping that Perplexity learned something about my blog, I asked it about my ancestor, James Crawford who married Sally Duggins.

The answer was surprisingly accurate. And the sources are pulling from my blog and from Wikitree.

While I still need to learn more about how to improve my blog, I’ve learned a lot about different AI tools and how to use them effectively. Thank you DearMyrtle for this experience.