Earlier this year the NYT dropped their subscription wall and Google started mixing many types of content (news, videos, etc.) directly into their search results.
10 Days ago Radiohead announced the name of their new album would be In Rainbows, and by the time the album was released today a person who uploaded a YouTube video of a live recording of the song Nude (from a concert I attended) already added the album name In Rainbows to the title of their popular recording.
Not only is more content coming online in more formats, and people getting better at writing for search and archiving information, but

• personal search history and personalized search are making it easier to find things you found before</p>search suggestions are consolidating misspellings and other search errors into a streamlined set of searches

Everything is heading toward free, faster by the day, except attention and trust. All these types of changes pose new competition, shift business models, and kill off some forms of search arbitrage. But they also enable new forms of marketing, especially if you pay attention to the changing ways search engines attempt to guide searchers and surface information, create editorial partnerships with search engines, publish a well read channel, or have a strong enough brand and large enough reach to make others want to participate in your community.


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