It seems likely to me that the search engine will be replaced by personal assistant type services: you ask a question, and you get direct access to that knowled

It seems likely to me that the search engine will be replaced by personal assistant type services: you ask a question, and you get direct access to that knowledge. Whether Google will replace the search engine itself, or whether it'll be another company, who knows. I'm being very speculative, of course, but the way I look at it: we initially had web directories, where we'd look up categories to find websites we wanted. That wasn't because we wanted directories, but because there wasn't sufficient technology for a search engine. Now, we have search engines, but is that what we really want? In some cases, yes, but in most cases we often just want the first result, or even just some information that's on that page. So why do we still use search engines? Because there isn't sufficient technology for something better...at least not yet, but Siri and Cortana and Google Now are getting there. Eventually these conversational interfaces and the metadata behind them will become so good that the direct use of a search engine will become an edge case. I think a better question might be how many years until Google replaces its homepage with Google Now (or something similar) instead of a search box?