The Era of Big Search is Over: Why 2010 Will Be All About Content

Article about what's to come in 2010 as far as content is concerned. Will Google continue to dominate the search space despite the changing landscape?

The era of the all-powerful search engine is waning. In its place, the power of the publisher and the content provider is rising again, just like it did in the early 19th century -- only the players will be very different.

Back when "Web 2.0" was still a shiny new moniker, search engines had unequaled power. They were the gatekeepers between content producers (like newspapers) and the eyeballs of readers, so much so that publishers like Rupert Murdoch came to think of search engines as "plagiarists" and "content kleptomaniacs." If you were putting content online, you had essentially one option: play to search engines by SEO'ing like crazy and buying ads on Google (GOOG). It was, as some histrionic pundits termed it, the "death" of the destination website. If you didn't play by Google's rules, the penalties were harsh: getting bumped down in Google's PageRank has killed at least a handful of startups.