For starters, he discussed the battle among the search engines. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered in a joint search effort, Yahoo claims it is applying a different algorithm to Bing’s index, which would mean different search results for Yahoo users. Even if this is the case, Clay believes that users will continually shift toward Bing.

Ask is no longer a player in the search space, but Blekko is in. However, Clay does not believe that it will emerge as a strong competitor for Google or Bing.

Moving on to Google, the search veteran predicted that Google would become a local search engine in 2 years. Local is definitely on the rise, especially since more money can be made in it. For example, local regions can bid on national terms such as shoes. By doing this, they have the potential to increase their ROI. If this happens, they are more likely to spend more money on their PPC campaigns, which means more money for Google in the long run.

“You either play in the local space… or you’re not going to get clicks even if you’re #1,” Clay points out.

He also talks about Google News and how he believes that it will be as big as local is now. He even predicted that Google News would be a viable competitor to major news outlets such as CNN and Fox News.

“I don’t believe we’re going to get into a situation where Google’s going to pass on an opportunity to control the flow of news,” he said.

Getting into social media, Clay made the statement that likes are the new links. Because social is becoming such a big part of search, he believes that likes, referrals, and recommendations will be factored into the ranking algorithm that search engines use. If this happens, you can expect to see new forms of spam.

Only time will tell if these predictions will come about, but the one thing that is certain is that it’s going to be a very interesting time in the search industry.

In this video, Clay suggests that likes, referrals, and recommendations will become major part of all the ranking algorithms used by search engines. You can see that the search engines are already very interested in this kind of social data, from Bing’s deal with Facebook to Google’s desire of Facebook’s data.

It’s going to be interesting to see just how big a role likes and other social interactions play in search overall, going forward. You can expect new kinds of spam and manipulation. Google and the other search engines will have their hands full trying to combat those hoping to game the system. The social networks will have their hands full as well.

Likes are already coveted by content providers all over the web. Listen to what Bruce Clay has to say about this and where the industry is heading.

To learn more about Bruce Clay’s predictions, watch the full interview.

She tells WebProNews that Caffeine consists of how Google crawls, indexes, and stores content online. Once the search giant crawls a page, it instantly takes that page and runs it through every part of the indexing pipeline and pushes it live. This means that a page could be live within a minute after it was crawled.

Another important note about Caffeine is the fact that it allows Google to associate more information about pages. Google now has the capacity to store any type of data in the future. This element is important since the Web is continuing to grow. In the future, Google could simply add signals if it needed to, as opposed to building a new infrastructure.

“This lays the groundwork for potentially changing the ranking algorithms in the future,” says Fox.

Speed is another factor of Caffeine that is natural since the Web is growing. Fox points out that the old index would have gotten overwhelmed and would, therefore, not be fresh.

Fox also addresses the MayDay update, which was an algorithm update, and what its implications are. This update received a bit of resistance due to its impact on content farms, forums, and product sites. Many of these sites dropped in ranking partially because they do not have a lot of links or content on them, which are prominent signals Google uses for ranking.

For more insights from Vanessa Fox, check out her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.

Ward says the biggest change is that in the early days, there were no engines that looked at or analyzed links. Rankings and links had nothing to do with one another, so you built links with people in mind. Then Google came along and recognized that there was a value in those links that they could measure. Suddenly, Ward says, that meant your links had two audiences – the people that could click them and the engines that could count them. The downside, he says, is that a whole industry has grown around building links purely for search rank. You know the story.

Before Google came along, links were often paid for, and they were basically just ads. People would just buy links from each other with the intent of people actually clicking them. It wasn’t about rank.

As Eric notes, Google has never actually said don’t buy links. They just say don’t buy our PageRank. Don’t buy the PageRank measure that they’ve assigned to a site. Buying a link would make sense just like buying a banner would’ve made sense ten years ago. If your motivation is click traffic that’s fine, says Ward. If your motivation is that you want to buy a link from a high PageRank site so that you can rank high, then you’re in the area that Google doesn’t like.

Ward contemplates what things would’ve been like had Google never released the toolbar with that PageRank number. It’s an interesting question, considering that Google pretty much tells people to ignore it. The company has even now eliminated PageRank from Webmaster Tools.

For those who may not know, BlockShopper is a website that provides home purchasing information for certain geographical locations, and Jones Day is a large law firm. In the lawsuit, Jones Day alleged that Blockshopper infringed upon its trademark by using the name “Jones Day” as the anchor text in the links to the law firm’s website. Two associates from Jones Day purchased homes in the Chicago area and BlockShopper reported the information and linked to their lawyer bios on the Jones Day website.

BlockShopper asked the court to dismiss the case, but the judge refused. Since this video was shot, the companies ended up settling and BlockShopper was forced to change its linking policies. Many bloggers, lawyers and those involved in the Internet industry believe that BlockShopper followed the standard Web linking procedure that all other websites follow.

Clarke says he does not believe Jones Day should have sued on the grounds of a trademark violation. He could believe a copyright or trademark infringement over the use of an image, but not over a hyperlink.

Sarah says that while BlockShopper may raise some privacy concerns in an ethical sense, the real estate site does not violate any laws. She questions the law firm’s understanding of the Internet and Web commerce since links are a positive practice.

In a post regarding the settlement, Attorney Paul Alan Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group encourages Internet communities to retaliate against Jones Day by “repeatedly deep-linking from its name, and to its web site, in precisely the ways to which it objects, but which cannot prevent through litigation.” He says the firm’s bullying should not continue.

Keep watching WebProNews for more videos from SES New York 2008.