  As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and
appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people
struggle with tasks on search engines every day. Often, their struggles relate
to the intrinsic complexity of their task and the failure of search systems to
fully understand the task and serve relevant results. The task motivates the
search, creating the gap/problematic situation that searchers attempt to
bridge/resolve and drives search behavior as they work through different task
facets. Complex search tasks require more than support for rudimentary fact
finding or re-finding. Research on methods to support complex tasks includes
work on generating query and website suggestions, personalizing and
contextualizing search, and developing new search experiences, including those
that span time and space. The recent emergence of generative artificial
intelligence (AI) and the arrival of assistive agents, based on this
technology, has the potential to offer further assistance to searchers,
especially those engaged in complex tasks. There are profound implications from
these advances for the design of intelligent systems and for the future of
search itself. This article, based on a keynote by the author at the 2023 ACM
SIGIR Conference, explores these issues and how AI agents are advancing the
frontier of search system capabilities, with a special focus on information
interaction and complex task completion.
