While I couldn’t fully capture every quote from the panel I moderated at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit this week, here’s a rough rundown.

The panel was Search as We See It, “Search Insiders’ view of the Future: Industry Trends, Challenges and things to keep an eye on.” The panelists included:

• Ron Belanger, VP, Worldwide Agency Sales, Omniture
• Daniel Boberg, VP, Advertiser & Agency Professional Services, Yahoo
• Brian Boland, Director, Media Auctions, Microsoft Advertising
• John Nicoletti, Head of Agency Operations, Google

Q: What was different compared to the Search Insider Summit in May 2008?

Everyone mentioned the economy to some extent, often to the full extent. Ron said profit optimization was big, as was customer retention. Yahoo mentioned that the economy has led to declines in click-through rates for commercial times, and lower order sizes. John noted economic issues, brought up the expanded use of universal search, and plugged Google Flu Trends (the only swine flu reference I recall hearing at the events.

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It’s time for a short trip five years in the making. This is the 224th Search Insider I’ve written for MediaPost, and most likely my last. As of next week, I’ll be switching over to the Social Media Insider.

My first Search Insider was published Friday, July 2, 2004, which was mercifully right before the holiday weekend so presumably no one read it. It was about Web design, a topic I’m not sure I’ve ever known anything about, but I had to start somewhere. Over the years, along with analyzing updates from the major search engines, parsing research, and covering events, I’ve tried to dig up lesser known examples of how consumers search to illustrate the evolution of the field.

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Search Insider: Stop! Who would claim to be the Bridge to the Death of Google must answer me these questions three. What is your name?

Search Engine: Today, call me Wolfram Alpha. I was previously known as Microsoft, Powerset and Cuil.

Search Insider: What is your quest?

Search Engine: To kill Google, of course. Actually, ‘Google-killer’ is just a term used by lazy journalists. My real quest is to return the answer to any factual question that you may have the nerve to ask, as I discussed on my blog. Read the full article

Where were you the day Google turned against its users?

If you were lucky, you were sleeping in. It happened Saturday, Jan. 31 at 6:30 a.m. in Mountain View, Calif., 9:30 a.m. in New York, 4:30 p.m. in Jerusalem, 8 p.m. in Delhi, and 10:30 p.m. in Beijing. Checking my own Google Web History, I entered my first query of the morning at 10:27 a.m. EST (looking up driving directions for a wedding that night), two minutes after the last of Google’s users encountered a problem.

It wasn’t a full-day breakdown; it was 40 minutes rolled out during an hour-long window. During that time, any Google search triggered the warning “This site may harm your computer” for every result. That day, five of the top 25 listings in Google Hot Trends were related to the glitch, including numbers one and three.

So what did we learn from this? Google needs to learn the most; it provides little value for its users and advertisers when it scares everyone away from surfing the Web. What about the rest of us though? Here are a few thoughts:

Google is Global
There are few unifying global forces with greater appeal than Google. ComScore reports that in December 2008, Google sites reached 77% of the world’s online audience, or 776 million people. The day’s not far off when there will be more Googlers than there will be Indians or Chinese. To that point, if there’s a catastrophe in Delhi, it might take time for the effects to ripple out to the eastern state of Assam, but when there’s a catastrophe in Mountain View, the whole world can feel the impact at once.

While in Israel seven years ago, I experienced New Year’s Eve as a meaningful event for the first time. Israelis in their 20s told me that it was their favorite holiday of the year — not the national Independence Day or the festive Jewish holiday of Purim — because it was the one day they were celebrating with everyone else around the world. Google has that similar way of crossing boundaries. Now, I may be searching for the text of President Obama’s inauguration address and someone else may be entering the query “death to America” (mercifully, a phrase with scant activity in Google Trends ), but at least we can have some common ground.

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After the Consumer Electronics Show this month, where I met with the executives from Ford and heard about their ambitious voice search plans, I kept wondering how the ability to conduct voice searches from their cars will change how people search, communicate, access information, and drive. It then made me wonder about all of the venues and devices people can search from. At CES, Dick Tracy, James Bond, and Inspector Gadget would have had a field day testing out the latest gizmos (if they could avoid Gadget’s nemesis Dr. Claw tricking them into joining a booby-trapped tweet-up).

These new devices aren’t meant to be solely for Inspectors; they’re supposed to be for all of us. Here’s a vision for how searches will differ when conducted in different settings from different devices. In all of these situations, we’ll take the example of a young, female, Dallas-based professional named Penny who’s searching for the best cupcakes.

INDOORS

Home PC

Query: “best cupcakes dallas tx.” Penny has a craving for something sweet after dinner, so she spends a few minutes trying to find recommendations. She uses Yahoo where, thanks to SearchMonkey, reviews from Yelp and Citysearch appear on the search engine results page.

Work PC

Query: “cupcakes plano tx.” It’s her receptionist’s birthday and Penny wants to find something near the office.

ON THE GO

Twitter

Query: “does anyone have any favorite cupcake places in dallas? I hope sam’s not following me or it’ll ruin the surprise ” She texts this to 40404 and uses TweetReplies.com to get responses emailed to her.

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