SearchResearch Challenge (3/4/2025): Can you extract and summarize a blog?

[Dan Russell]

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

SearchResearch Challenge (3/4/2025): Can you extract and summarize a blog?

Can AI systems really read the web? 

P/C Gemini [elderly robot reading a long scroll of blog names]. No I don't recognize any of the blogs shown on the scroll, nor why it uses so many different fonts in a ransom note style.

Just last year people using AIs to ask up-to-date questions would often run into the "knowledge cutoff date" problem.  That's the date of the last training cycle, when all of the information in the LLM was solidified.  

Since then various AIs have been claiming that they now have continuous updates because they're able to read web content in real-time.  (Here's a news article describing the new real-time web access capabilities of some LLMs.)  

I've explored this a bit and come to some insights--and that leads to today's Challenge: 

1. Can you get an LLM AI system to give you the 10 most recent links to a blog?  For instance, could you get Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, or MS Copilot to make a table of the 10 most recent blog posts?

That seems like a simple enough request for an AI system, yes?  

We keep reading about AI agents that claim to be able to take actions on your behalf by operating your applications to get-things-done.  So let's ask for a simple task ("make a list of the 10 most recent posts") and see how well it does.  

I'll show you how I did it next week and talk about the issues involved.  

I'm VERY curious to see how well you did.  Were you able to do one request and get back the list?  

As a sample blog, you might try good old SearchResearch, but you might also try something like OpenAI's blog or Google's Gemini blog. 

Keep searching!  

--

Daniel M. Russell 

Check out my book:  The Joy of Search (2019) 

Available in fine bookstores (and online) everywhere.