This article expresses the belief that search as we know it is coming to an end. It asserts that search will become obsolete as internet social networks become more sophisticated. Social networks form around content, and services help content find social networks. When a new page enters it makes its way through a series of filters and if it is something likely to catch your interest it appears in a feed on your desktop before you even look for it. The underlying structure of how we experience the internet then changes fundamentally from the structure of the data to the structure of social networks.

I am suspicious of this because I do not think enough people will spend enough time on the web for this to work universally. While tagging works well in some situations it seems to unreliable, easy to fool, to be used as a primary means of dealing with content. Also, the need will remain for searches for things unrelated to a users usual web activity - quick queries about things that randomly come up. I also hope some major changes happen before this becomes the case because it would require that you have a huge amount of data about you available on the web, and unless the nature of the web changes it is very public. Companies have an economic incentive to know everything they can about you, and Google is getting very good at it.

This article discusses some of the possible future technologies in search. I think the diagram is very optimistic about the difficulty of natural language processing and good AI, but it is interesting and aesthetically pleasing.