Bill Gates has said, “‚ĶSearch today is still kind of a hunt, where you get all these links, and as we teach software to understand the documents, really read them in the sense a human does, you’ll get answers more directly‚Ķ” And branching off of that, here are some predictions for where search engines are headed in the next year. While some are pretty wild, like when “a single query will bring a gallery of results equivalent to running multiple queries about the meaningful variations of the same topic,” I’d be happy enough with evolution such that “a search engine will let users evaluate answers on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through to links.”