Search is dead!: long live search

Back in the heady days of 1999 and WWW8 (Toronto) we held a panel titled "Finding Anything in the Billion Page Web: Are Algorithms the Key?" In retrospect the answer to this question seems laughably obvious - the search industry has burgeoned on a foundation of algorithms, cloud computing and machine learning. As we move into the second decade of this millennium, we are confronted with a dizzying array of new paradigms for finding content, including social networks and location-based search and advertising. This panel pulls together senior experts from academia and the major search principals to debate whether search will continue to look anything like the 2-keywords-give-10-blue-links paradigm that Google has popularized. What do emerging approaches and paradigms - natural language search, social search, location-based search - mean for the future of search in general?