Fred Wilson and Greg Linden both ask the question of where search is headed (see Fred, see Greg).

To put it simply, search is headed human. In other words, the next generation of information retrieval is going to be powered primarily by humans -- not algorithms. This is more than social search (i.e. Del.icio.us-style tagging); this is more like Yahoo's old human-edited directory. It's going to be humans reconstructing the data on the web into something meaningful. Think Wikipedia. Think media reconstruction.

The economics behind the revolution: how value is changing

There are a number of factors at play here that are going to bring about this revolution. Consider:

• Due to open source technology and ventures like Amazon's Open Search, the technology to categorize massive amounts of information is now free. When technology gets commoditized, value shifts from the technology to the users of the technology.
• The popularization of peer production results in the ability to create massive amounts of content. If executed properly -- and this will be a key dimension along which publishing companies will compete -- the content can be meaningful and of high quality.
• With classification technology commoditized and publishing capacity significantly increased via peer production, the ability to create information-rich sites with robust internal and external linking structures that are sticky to end users will become far more feasible to create. Search engines are particularly vulnerable to such sites, as evidenced in part by the success Wikipedia and About.com enjoy in the search engines.
• Since such sites can essentially eat search engines from within, they will draw more attention from end users. Since they draw more attention, they will draw more ad dollars.

This is how the search engines will be beat. This is the future of search.

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