I don't know if there will be a 'next search engine'. From the days before Google, search engine in general haven't changed much. In the beginning there was ju

I don't know if there will be a 'next search engine'. From the days before Google, search engine in general haven't changed much. In the beginning there was just string matching, word stemming followed, then we had synonyms and are getting more towards NLP for getting the user intend. Also, if the communication with the engine is via a text box or via a voice command or a live smartphone picture (for augmented reality) does not really matter. So, what can change is just the "smartness" of information retrieval at the backend and the ranking factors (from freshness to PageRank to whatever). Given the fact that the market power of Google actually shapes the internet by introducing their best practices (like AMP or schema.org) on webmasters on a large scale, I doubt that there will be one company with the big breakthrough in information retrieval like Google was. Maybe this field is now more or less saturated for the majority of use cases that it will only evolve slowly and not revolutionary.