I recently had a conversation with the newly launched techno-human hybrid chat search engine, ChaCha. For those not familiar with ChaCha, this engine uses human researchers in a side chat interface as a live search engine results page is built before your eyes. My purpose was to test a search funnel process over several keywords and phrases to see if the guide would lead me to a satisfying result.

Sometimes you get a better sense of the meaning of a picture by looking at its negative. That's precisely the case withage and video search. My last column hailed the technological advances of Facebook, Riya, and PodZinger. The end glossed over the social implications, yet those issues matter much more than the technology.

Last Wednesday, megapublisher Meredith Corporation (publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Parents, to name a few holdings) purchased interactive agencies Genex and New Media Strategies. It was an incredible deal for Meredith, as it brings advertising accounts like Honda, Unilever, Citigroup, ABC, Coca Cola, Ford, Sony, and AT&T under Meredith's roof, and most likely onto Meredith's magazine pages. It's also a move that would have been utterly unthinkable ten years ago.

How good are advertisers really becoming at tying together daily life with search? For me, daily life is usually about sports. So, I thought an interesting and relevant study would be to take a few typical media interactions in my life, all sports-specific, and see if the ads followed through with a search component.

Those of us in the search space who have been doing it for a while are getting tired. We're becoming burnt-out. As exciting as the ride has been since 2000, we're beginning to realize that there is a life beyond search, or at least, the seat that we're currently sitting in. There are a number of individual issues emerging that signal a significant change coming, and the time is now. We are succumbing to our own version of the 7-Year Itch.

Yes, we search marketers made a lot of progress in 2006, and the outlook for '07 and beyond shines bright. However, before we fall back into our old routine of present, plan, implement, and optimize, it's important to take a moment and outline some concrete goals for the year ahead so we can ensure that the emergence and convergence of search is not led by traditional media execs, (who still seem to be looking for ways to make search more like traditional ad vehicles as opposed to the other way around).

Want to be in pictures? You'll soon have better luck discovering if you're already in them, thanks to companies that are stepping up their efforts to allow people to tag and find images and videos online. We'll look at a few examples with Facebook, Riya, and PodZinger today, and return to others in the future.

On the heels of AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth, the newly-ginormous AT&T announced last week that it would enter into mobile advertising. If all goes well, advertisers will purchase their first mobile ads through AT&T later this year. I, for one, think it could be a great idea for AT&T to serve as a mobile ad network. But if it wants to succeed, AT&T should start thinking about Wikiasari--the upstart search engine (still in development) from the people who brought you Wikipedia, the wildly-popular user-generated encyclopedia.

Think that natural search and paid inclusion are dead, or meta tags are a waste of time? Think again.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average teen or adult will spend 65 days in front of the TV--and only A little over a week on the Internet. I have just one question: Who the hell are these people? Nobody I know.