I was thinking the other day about the auto-search feature on Google and how a few years ago, even at the suggestion of such a feature, would've caused people to laugh (or look forward to it). Then I thought "What would search engines be like in a few years?" As one idea, I thought about using inflection in the search terms. For example, the search statement: "how do people find my website?" would display the results you would expect. But with inflection included, the results would be slightly different based on certain keywords that are emphasised. Example: "how DO people find my website" & "how do people FIND my website" These would display slightly different results based on the emphasised words. I'm sure there are better examples of statements which would explain this better but I cannot think of any at the moment. So where do you think search engines are heading?
What would be the future of SEO is tough to say but a bulk of jobs is coming in this field and it is spreading more & more but one thing would be never change that's low salary in this field. Salary will never be handsome in this field.
Whatever the case, search engines are here to stay. They may become more sophisticated I suppose; hopefully we will have more than ONE dominating the world!
Future of search engines very bright but more accurate results need to still in market. People only need right and accurate results like Google.