With Alexa – a name that was easy for a machine to be understood and somehow connected with the Library of Alexandria one of the most significant libraries in the ancient times, Amazon, in November 2014 introduces a smart speaker developed by its notorious research arm the Amazon Lab126. Alexa is a connected speaker that listens for voice commands and respond with information or by triggering a task (these are applications called Skills and developed by Amazon or by third-party developers).
In 2017 Amazon partnered with Microsoft to integrate more tightly with Cortana (the personal digital assistant from Redmond). Since the beginning search services from Alexa have been provided by Bing and this is most likely due to the fact that Amazon by using Google Search, would have also helped in training Google Assistant that is de facto its strongest competitor.
While not directly connected with online search, using Alexa, users can trigger online searches.
Read the full history of the SERP to learn more about the evolution of web search into personal digital assistants