Jeffrey M. O’Brien of Fortune Magazine writes :”The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What’s the difference? Search is what you do when you’re looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you. When it comes to search, there’s a clear winner — a $145 billion company called Google.”

If the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is about making better sense of data and content, so that real people can use it, it will be an improvement on the dreary Web 2.0 stuff. Google has been at work on this for a while now — person-centric IPTV advertising (pitching adverts to a single person’s interests) is one of its major goals.

The new search engines will seek out connections and intelligent comments that have real meaning and value to the reader. Google is beginning to do this with its sidebars of extra choices within a search topic.

O’Brien says : “But there is no go-to discovery engine — yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today. It’s no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable so it works on your mobile phone — well, such a tool could change not just marketing, but all of commerce. ”