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Comment by Smoosh | Hacker News Reader

I see mention in the article of content creation. But are search engines working on task-related personal assistants?

For one example, If I want to take a holiday, could an assistant work out the best dates (based upon preferences of availability, cost etc), and research the best airfares (excluding that particular airline I hate) and find a hotel room with the features I want, and throw in a few sightseeing activities which appeal to my personal tastes, then summarise it up into a travel itinerary for me to approve. Then, upon approval it proceeds to book (and pay for?) all the things.

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While it could automate it I don't think it would be better.

In fact it would be worse. Websites would try and game the system to be the one that ChatGPT chooses for you. And now you are relying on a system that has no incentive of telling you the truth. At least if I check to go kayaking on day 2 of my vacation, I can compare the top 3 websites, cross reference with Yelp to see which one has the best value for the $.

Plus there still is the part where the data being sourced isn't formatted the same, so mistakes will be made. It even happens with manual research. You miss the part where one offers a pickup and the other one doesn't. ChatGPT will suffer from that too.

It isn't just websites trying to game it. It's brands wanting to pay for placement in the results, aka search ads. And Google wanting to maximize their metrics.

In the short term this may bias towards giving me the best organic results, but will it shift to pushing me ever more aggressively to what advertisers are bidding on?

>best airfares >hotel room >sightseeing activities

You can bet that there will be a bidding war behind the scene by those wanting to be the "best" airline and the "best" hotel and the "best" activity.

This has been the case for decades now - Google, Booking, Expedia etc. are not something new.

We are working on this as a part of Kagi Search Labs, but it is worth noting that this steps outside the domain of search engines. By the time this technology matures, we will be talking about digital assistants.

GPT-4 with a calendar plugin can likely already do this.

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