Interesting discussion kicked off here, that slows down towards the end.  But its a start.  I think we are at an inflection point, and that means we should expect change.  One of the things that occurs to me is the ease with which a name can leap to the top of search results, with no expenditure on advertising, or SEO.

First, there was basic algorithmic search (such as AltaVista), and then came very predictable paid search business models to fuel innovation. The industry is now maneuvering through its third era: social search.

Source: The Impending Social Search Inflection Point

This leads me to be immediately sceptical.  If search results have moved to dependence on social elements, someone, somewhere must be looking to monetise that.

Social search addresses relevance head-on. After “on-the-page” and “off-the-page” criteria, web connectivity and link authority, relevance is now increasingly augmented by implicit and explicit user behaviors, social networks and communities.

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As articulated by Chris Sherman, social search is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment. Social search is people helping people find stuff using plain-language questions and answers, collaborative content harvesting, directory building, voting and ranking, sharing, tagging, commenting on bookmarks, Web pages, news, images, videos and podcasts.

The issue is search economics.

Web 2.0 innovations are disruptive. The emergence of open standards, richer user experiences, content portability, social networks and communities are quite disruptive to traditional algorithmic search, and are converging toward social search.

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Aren’t we all spending more time in aggregators, emails, and applications that automatically pull in information? Is the results page slowly getting marginalized as the web’s main information retrieval space?

Finally this comment is thought provoking.  I just worry that the quality search we see today based on information value might get skewed by financial considerations.

Advertisers traditionally follow consumers. Social search is already channeling significant amounts of traffic and should accelerate the pace of brand advertising dollars shifting online. Internet sentiment analysis, buzz monitoring and online reputation management could very well emerge as the next significant search marketing era after search engine optimization and paid search.