There is no profitable scope in search engine market. Is saturated, Google remains the king and will be there for a lot of time...
But still, in future, when more people will get online, all they want is services that respond to them in real time. Like example - Twitter. I know a lot of people who trust Twitter for their updates. A lot of people get breaking news on their mobil using Twitter. They dont rely 100 % on mechanical algorithm based search engine to give them results they want. In fast paced world, a search engine is fine, but slowly and surely, it will give way to services that provide real time access to information content. My bet is on them..