John Battelle, former editor of Wired magazine, is the leading commentator on search. In November he published his good read The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. In the concluding chapter on the future of search he says:

As every engineer in the search field loves to tell you, search is at best 5% solved. … Search needs to solve what so far has been a rather intractable problem: the invisible web … everything that is available via the web but has yet to be found by search engines … walled off from search for commercial or technological reasons. [In the future] search will be let loose on all manner of devices. … Anywhere there might be a chip, there can and most likely will be search.

These are his predictions for 2006.

And watch out for IPv6, the upgrade to the internet that will connect not just phones and TVs but kettles and fridges to the net.