I just typed “is Monday a public holiday in Auckland” into Google and the second link is full list of holidays from www.govt.nz. I don't think Google is done. I still use it and it has ~79% share on desktop. Most of the rest seem to be people who have bing as default on Windows and haven't changed it. 0.87% use Duck Duck go which is probably the highest on the list that people choose as a better search engine rather than because it came installed as default.
I'm kind of surprised Google has dominated so long but I guess it's lots of money -> hire lots of bright people -> make innovations, that keeps them up there. That may work for AI too? Dunno.
I clicked Copilot button in Bing with this search term and it said the exact answer I was looking for, in plain English:
"Yes, *Monday, January 27th* is a public holiday in Auckland. It's the *Auckland Anniversary Day*, which is celebrated on the Monday nearest to January 29th each year.
Do you have any special plans for the holiday?"
It cited 2 sources which turned out to be correct (this time).
Seems far more efficient than googling which nowadays gives you an entire first page of ads. Although I'm not sure to what extent hallucination issues have been sorted out.
I'm kind of surprised Google has dominated so long but I guess it's lots of money -> hire lots of bright people -> make innovations, that keeps them up there. That may work for AI too? Dunno.