We're Not Ready for What's Coming Next in Search

As a child of the '80s, I can divide my life cleanly into Before Google and After Google. Right around the turn of the millennium, the internet stopped being a tangled thicket of incomplete lists of weird stuff and became a useful research database. Ever since, Google Search has been one of the only technological constants of my adult life, persisting through the rise of smartphones, social media, streaming services, and even drone-based burrito delivery (also, what happened to that?). In all that time, nobody has been able to challenge Google's role as gatekeeper to the cornucopia of digital abundance. More than 90 percent of internet users around the world use Google to shop, navigate, and satisfy their curiosity about pretty much everything.