This has a flavor of reviving some ideas on how search will change that had been popular in the late 1990s / early 2000s. There were a number of proposals that

This has a flavor of reviving some ideas on how search will change that had been popular in the late 1990s / early 2000s. There were a number of proposals that "search engines" as a tool that users use to query for information should be replaced with a paradigm of "software agents" that build a model of what the user is looking for or trying to do, and which then roam around the web on the user's behalf. Here's a survey of some of those proposals from a 1999 Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/agents/agents.html http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/agents/agents.html This isn't meant to be a criticism, because implementation makes a huge difference, so it's quite plausible that a proposed-and-didn't-catch-on idea could catch on in another form. For example, Google has much better profile data on you than late-'90s research systems were able to collect. But I think looking at the previous iteration of attempts is still interesting.