There are dreams that have been around for a while…a tablet computer for students instead of text books. We’ve wanted that for ages. A computer that can see, that can learn…computing today is really in its infancy.

- Bill Gates

19 years ago, this was a top of the line, monster Personal Computer:

Now, multi-touch screens that could revolutionize computer input are right around the corner:

50,000 Gigabyte DVDs will allow every person with a computer to store more information than is currently in the entire Google Index.

What will we use that kind of storage for? Things like Microsoft’s Lifelogger

For the past seven years, Bell has been conducting an audacious experiment in “lifelogging”–creating a near-total digital record of his experience. His custom-designed software, “MyLifeBits,” saves everything it can get its hands on. For every piece of email he sends and receives, every document he types, every chat session he engages in, every Web page he surfs, a copy is scooped up and stashed away. MyLifeBits records his telephone calls and archives every picture–up to 1,000 a day–snapped by his automatic “SenseCam,” that device slung around his neck. He has even stowed his entire past: The massive stacks of documents from his 47-year computer career, first as a millionaire executive then as a government Internet bureaucrat, have been hoovered up and scanned in. The last time he counted, MyLifeBits had more than 101,000 emails, almost 15,000 Word and PDF documents, 99,000 Web pages, and 44,000 pictures.

will be a mere drop in the bucket. The entire library of congress will be digitized along with every video ever available in Ultra-High Resolution. In 20 years, who knows? We could be browsing holographic libraries like a scene out of Minority Report:

Search still has a long way to go before it can sort, order, and prioritize that volume of information. We act like the game is already over and Google has won. But there are already more than 100 other search engines working on how to best organize the worlds information.

As the amount of information continues to increase exponentially, the shift towards an attention economy will become even more pronounced:

The primary economic consequence of the micromedia explosion is that the equilibrium price of media everywhere falls. This is due to the simple economics of supply and demand, where prices fall when the supply curve shifts outward. In turn, the micromedia explosion means that competition for attention becomes truly intense, with economics most media markets haven’t seen since the era of the printing press: attention becomes relatively more expensive than production.

Search Engines will continue to be a gateway to that most valuable prize in the new economic paradigms: Attention. As such, the importance of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Engineering and Viral Marking will become even more pronounce in the decades to come.

You’re in the right industry. You’re in it at the right time. You’re in it while search is still in its infancy.