SearchResearch Challenge (9/17/25): New agentic ways to get regular updates on a topic

Having a Research Assistant working for you is great... 

Image by Gemini showing [a scholar writing in front of a calendar], capturing the
need to do periodic updates on research topics. I love that it's SO old-fashioned.

... especially if you can get them to work on a regular schedule and produce useful, insightful summaries of things you should know.  

The advantage of a human Research Assistant (RA) working on your behalf is that they deeply understand what you're interested in and how that shifts and changes over time.  

The disadvantage of a human Research Assistant is that they're really expensive.  They're wonderful, but very few people can afford their own RA.  

We've discussed before about having regular Google Alerts that will constantly monitor the internet for items your cached searches will turn up.  

We've also talked about Google Scholar Alerts (same idea, except just within Scholar) and YouTube Alerts.  SemanticScholar has the same concept--a "standing query" that can run on a regular schedule, updating you with the latest results.  There are several other services that do similar things, discussed in this SRS post from 2023.

It should then come as no surprise to find that many of the current AIs have similar ideas.  ChatGPT and Gemini both have ways to set up a periodic alert-scan that will send you an update on whatever your topic-of-interest is. (Perplexity, Llama, and Claude don't currently support this.)  Basically, you set up an agent to periodically run a compare-and-contrast search for you on your topic.  

They're called different things by different companies, but whether you call them GPTs (OpenAI), GEMS (Gemini), subagents (Anthropic), characters (Meta)... or whatever... they all need a bit of setup.  

But setting them up is a bit like anticipating the chat you'll need to have.  Here are some tips about setting up these regular summaries.  

ChatGPT (Sep 16, 2025)

Once you've got your weekly task setup, you can click on the 3 dots to edit it.  You'll want to give it a reasonable name and clear instructions.  

Note that I've changed the default date/time of summary.  My prompt says what to search, the time scope (last 7 days), the topic (human sensemaking), with instructions about what kinds of sources I'm interested in (peer-reviewed papers...),  and how to create the summary (concise weekly summary with title, venue/source...).  

Here's a similar way to do this on Gemini: 

Gemini (Sep 15, 2025)  

(The instructions are clipped in this screencap.)  

In all cases, you want your prompt to follow all of the guidelines you know from setting up "regular prompts" (e.g., be specific, be directive, say what you want and what you don't want).  

Sample output looks like this (sent as email):  

ChatGPT output  (sent from OpenAI <noreply@tm.openai.com> on the sensemaking topic)

The output from Gemini is fairly similar.  I don't yet have enough experience with them to say which I prefer; I'll let you know if I find a big difference. 

Important:  How to manage your automated tasks.  

Gemini: Open a new Gemini window and go to the settings icon.  (Should be on the bottom left--looks like a gear icon.)  Click on "Scheduled Actions" to see all of your automated tasks.  

ChatGPT:  Very similar-go to Settings (bottom left). Click on the person icon (or your initials), then Settings, then "Schedules."  

From these pages you can edit the task or delete them.   

SearchResearch Lessons 

Upshot: Here's another method for keeping up-to-date on a topic area.  Now that we've got so many ways to do this, be careful to monitor your total feed--it's very possible to setup so many feeds (so many newletters!) that you can be overwhelmed.  

1.  Keep track.  I keep track of how much time I'm spending reading on a topic so I can be aware of how invested I am in a particular domain.  Every so often (roughly quarterly) I take an hour and assess how much time I'm spending on a given topic.  If it's too much, that's when you decide to delete something from your personal feed.  

2. Tune your instructions. When setting up your weekly prompt, be sure to write it out as clearly as you can.  Use your knowledge from doing regular prompting to inform your summary agent prompt.  

Keep searching!   (Just don't overdo it...)  

I changed the prompt to include "modern researcher writing on a dual monitor computer"