source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chinwagcom/3966681689/in/set-72157622483452494/

This week I was fortunate enough to speak on the panel at Chinwag.coms "Search is Dead, Long Live Search" event in SOHO. The turn out was pretty good, and the discussion surprisingly broad, why?
Because whether you like it or not, search is getting more and more important due to the ever vast amount of information being created online.

• 20hrs of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 4,500,000,000+ Tweets. 377 tweets per second
• Five exabytes of new information - roughly five billion gigabytes - was created in 2002 alone.
  (Five exabytes is like half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections.)

And while the social graph is helping create more user generated content, that in turn helps in a better understanding of what is important to us and what is not, it is still the engineering and algorithmic expertise of the major search engines that makes it hang together. While it doesn't look like a lot is changing they are most definitely evolving to incorporate better use of filters such as search history, location and time; data sources such as video indexing, social media activity; query interpretation via a better understanding of semantics and much better understanding of web data and appropriate interface formats via indexing of semantic markup.

Ironically Search is Dead, Long Live Search, comes from the King is Dead, Long Live the King, which comes from the French "Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!".

Where will we be without search? Lost is a disorganised, unmanageable or navigable, ever growing mountain of data.

Definitely, long live Search, long live the ROI!

Update 0510909: Some more feedback from fellow panelist: Alan Patrick
http://broadstuff.com/archives/1887-The-Future-of-SEO-Search-Me!.html