Chatbots are the wrong metaphor. Having a series of successfully refining queries is useful. Pretending that this happens through a dialogue with an intelligent interlocutor is false and misleading given the current level of technology. And hopefully it stays that way. As a biological human, I'm absolutely not looking forward having silicon & iron competition.

Its a hard challenge to create bots that have good UX and help users, even without taking context/history into account. A lot of companies are just focusing on getting that right, and delivering that value first.

But I think everyone building bots wants to go beyond that. I work on bots at Intercom and believe we can build bot experiences much better than traditional search.

At the same time, I think google search is heading a conversational direction - context now carries over between queries, and it seems like that naturally trends towards more conversational or agent interfaces.