At some event called the Churchill Club Top Tech Trends, VC Steve Jurvetson had an interesting idea about the future direction of search.
He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people's browsers at the moment that people are searching. "All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying," he said.
I like that idea a lot, but it got me thinking: how many instances of Firefox can you run on a cheapo LInux box, how many tabs could you have open in each of those browsers, and would that be more or less cost effective than the search term gaming that currently happens? In other words, good luck with that!