Please no more chatbots. Use the underlying tech to build a better search engine, but please stop recreating the concept of a search engine in a “chatbot.”
Whats frustrating is chatbots have the opportunity to be better than search. You can hold on to the conversation history as context for the next command and refine a search in a way a single command can't but no one seems to bother. As you say, chatbots are just poor search interfaces.
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.
