I’m attending SES at the moment (going on till tomorrow March 26th) and being a bit of an outsider to this area it’s just fascinating to step back for a second and see the amazing ecosystem that search has produced. There are an incredible number of groups of people existing and making a living in this ecosytem: marketers (PPC marketers, corporate marketers, SEM), affiliates, aggregators, optmizers, SEO gurus… The list is endless and dizzying.

The most predominant theme I’ve noticed so far is the growing emphasis on display/content advertising. This seems to be the result of two trends: 1. Because search is just 5% of a web users activity and a very mature market, it becomes obvious to start looking at other options as this area starts to become hyper competitive. With the mind numbing rate at which content is being produced on the web and introduction of self service tools, it’s also becoming cheaper and easier to do display advertising. 2. Google, Yahoo, MSN are all working on adding more media and content to their search pages (try doing a search on “Rihanna” on the three to see what I mean) and the search page is essentially evolving into a content rich page as opposed to just a collection of links. These all lead to the need to create more interesting ads and innovative targeting technologies for this type of advertising. Two companies that are doing some really neat things in this space are Lookery and Dapper. They both have a common theme of breaking the silos of information that exist on different sites and making them accessible elsewhere. Very fascinating stuff and would be cool to see how this all shakes out.