Web 2.0 isn't about a sudden single new development, but instead the gradual emergence of a new type of practice. Web 2.0 is an ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of web pages into a fully functional computing platform. In other words, instead of the internet just being a place with lots of websites, the Web 2.0 concept is its change into an over-arching application that you will be able to use seamlessly and which is integral to the concept of 'Search' in the future.
If you think about all of the programs and applications that you use on your computer being what makes up the internet then you can see the scope of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the convergence of new technologies on the web to make up a new super-technology - and informational exchange lies at the heart of this concept.
Information has always been power and the runaway success of a company such as Google shows just how rich the rewards are for that power. Because Google is all about the serving of information it follows that it is the filtering, ordering and storing of that information which has ultimately made the company - and, in many ways the internet - the way it is today.
The Web 2.0 concept seems tied to the emergence of Social Search which impacts on the generation of user generated tags of quality and importance to information which would otherwise be attributed those elements through algorithmic sorting. Therefore Google and the other big names in the search engine game: Yahoo!, Microsoft Live (MSN), and Ask; need to be sitting up and taking notice.
And they are. Yahoo! has invested the most heavily in outside companies which are currently spearheading the social search and current crop of Web 2.0 hopefuls, but Google has homegrown a few services which have a distinct edge of Web 2.0 to them. Microsoft has stated its case for major expenditure and investment in cutting edge Web 2.0 search concepts, and the only player not currently heavily involved is Ask - and even they are investing in services such as Bloglines and building Blog, RSS, and news feed search functionality into their main search feature.
There is a push being felt online as these giants of search race to get the edge because as we all know online dominance can all to easily become shaky and seen to be old news. Just ask Microsoft.
