I think if anything we're at a crossroads. Natural language is great for some types of queries, but has its limits for others. Internet search engines have come

I think if anything we're at a crossroads. Natural language is great for some types of queries, but has its limits for others. Internet search engines have come to be used for a lot of different tasks, and a large part of Google's sticking power has been that it's at least decent at most of them. But that may also be a bit of a problem. Based on everything I've seen so far, it appears that the more conversational a search engine is, the worse it tends to become at the task search engines originally did (i.e. finding documents about a topic). We've also sort of started to perform all sorts of things through this medium of document-finding, that perhaps could be done differently. I think it does a disservice to both those other tasks and the usefulness of document-finding.