Where exactly do you see search going that Google isn't already super invested in (NLP, speech recognition, Google Now integration)?

Here's a thought:

There's a field where Google has been doing slightly worse as time goes by: questionable search. It's a running joke by now that Bing's video search is much better for searching porn that Youtube. Similarly, searching for "<band> full album mp3 download" on Google is bound to return useless websites. Sometimes the actual results are to be found inside the text of a DMCA takedown notice, meaning that Google has the result, but refuses to show it to you.

And speaking of bad results, some specific terms (such as moving companies) are so full of SEO garbage that there's no way to get a reliable result.

There's definitely room for competition - otherwise, DuckDuckGo would have been out of business by now.

Really? The thing is with stuff like SnapChat, Facebook and Tumblr, I find myself actually using less and less of any web search. The only thing I search for is programming related questions. Nowadays I go directly to Stackoverflow.

it sounds like Google is doubling down on search - a very natural thing for a BigCo to double down on what they already have success in - while missing on "discovery"/"guidance"/"curation".

What about search going social. It seems to me that I find a lot of my information on the social media now like Facebook. It just seems like i search a lot less now than i used to. Its not that people search on social media. I get fed information relentlessly and i have little time or energy left to google anything.

Google's lead and "special sauce" seems to be much deeper than that, though. Unless you can think of a way to do better search without AI, how do you compete?

We're not talking about handset A vs. B. The technical and talent lead is much deeper wrt. Google and Machine Learning.

That really depends on what the upheaval is. Apple didn't make a better version of a black berry, it made an iPhone. I think Google is probably safe for a while, but it's hard to see seismic shifts coming.