What Was Hot in Search in 2007

SearchEngineWatch.com published a review last week entitled 2007: The Year that Search Grew Up that summarizes some of the major trends, including:

• The Year of Blended and Universal Search: "One of the most significant changes for search engine optimizers (SEOs) this year was the introduction of universal, or blended search results. Instead of the familiar "ten blue links," searchers are now beginning to see more than just HTML pages mixed into search results. Video and images, news stories, blog posts, local business data, and more are now appearing alongside other sites."
• It's All About the Quality (Score): "On the search advertising side, the top search ad networks all incorporated a measure of quality into their ad ranking algorithms. Instead of competing solely on bid price, now search marketers have to take into account factors like click-through rates, as well as more ethereal factors like historical performance and an ad's expected performance relative to other ads."
• Year of Social Media: "Looking at the surge in popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, social elements of networks like Flickr and YouTube, the rise and fall of social news sites like Digg and Netscape, and the beginnings of social search sites like Mahalo and Search Wikia, it would be fair to call 2007 the Year of Social Media. Even Google got involved, with the launch of its OpenSocial APIs."