So-called "latent search" is an immediate/near-term tech trend to keep an eye on and a piece of thread that connects three of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Hmmm...

Until now, if you wanted to search for something on the web, you typed in keywords. Google has trained us all to type in those words in order of importance, not the order in which they make sense. In the future, that may change. Google, Facebook, and Apple are all developing tools that will allow us to search the way we speak naturally, even though searching for the kinds of non-specific, abstract, or latent concepts we use in real life — "where is a good place to eat dinner?" — generally produces useless search results.

...this does not seem like much of a horse race.

Given how bad Siri and Facebook Search are, the advantage here goes to Google culturally.

Culturally they are best-equipped to engineer simple solutions to hard software problems.