Last week I put "W1F 0TF" into trusty ol' Google Maps and found my way to the Slug & Lettuce on Wardour Street for Chinwag Live's 'Search is Dead, Long Live Search' event. Examining some of the key challenges currently facing search engines, and what these may mean for brands, web companies (not least SEO agencies) and users in general, the lively panel discussion helped crystallise some ideas I've been pondering in recent times.

Just as the ferocious 'Browser Wars' continue to rage, the fight for search engine dominance remains in full force. In the West we are so familiar with you-know-who that the word 'Googled' is poised to become the 21st Century 'hoover' and lose its capitalisation, so we'd be forgiven for thinking the battle effectively ended some time ago. But step away from the primary colours; the story isn't so simple.

First, look to the Far East where the landscape is remarkably different - Baidu holds a mountainous 69% in China, while Google has only a hilly 25% (July 2009). Second, stop thinking about search purely in terms of the 'traditional' search engines, since these now represent only one of many powerful ways to discover content, and the picture is less clear.

The classic tussling for search engine market share remains, without doubt, critically important to the web's dynamics. Despite its 'Don't be evil' motto, some people are fearful of Google's dominance, and rooting for its imminent downfall. But it didn't reach the top through coercion, foul play, or even clever marketing - it did so because it had the best technical solution to one of the web's biggest problems: organising its mind-boggling masses of data. The most fascinating questions to my mind are not whether people might desert Google in fear of their privacy, but who can provide the best solutions to the web's increasingly complex problems and keep up with dramatic changes in user behaviour?

The topic of the moment is real-time search. Relative new kid on the block Twitter has made a small but prominent dent in the web with its microblogging service. Its internal search engine provides near instant updates of what people are discussing, and the service has proven to be a powerful tool in breaking news and covering real world events. Google has admitted performing less well in this respect, and rightly so. But it has a far bigger job to do than Twitter, which is only indexing data on its own servers and can only organise information through chronology. It's not a threat, but an indirect prod that says "there's an appetite for this real-time data - how are you going to handle it?"

One of Twitter's most compelling features is its display of trends. They're fascinating, but isn't Google effectively viewing the web as a huge collection of long-term trends, within which people can search very specifically? After all, the method with which Google gives a page 'authority' is by the number of links directed towards it, links that should (and, despite unscrupulous techniques, still for the larger part do) show people recommending that page. Google was always social, it just operates in slow-motion.

A form of recommendation was at the root of Google's first (and reigning) superior technical solution. Now the web is both bigger and more social, the role of recommendation has never been more profound. There are three prominent models, which I shall liberally over-simplify:

• Look at everything you can find, weigh up what everyone values as best you can, let people search it (that's Google, kinda)
• Create interconnected networks and let people see what their friends find value in (Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon)
• Look at what a person does, compare it with what other people do, make suggestions (Amazon, Last.fm)

The points at which these models intersect represent, at least to me, some of the most interesting developments in search. One cannot be shoe-horned into the other, but imaginative overlaps can and have been emerging. Search engines promoting results based on what you searched for and clicked on in the past. Social networks recommending you new friends based on what you talk about or comment on. Popular e-commerce sites letting you search what your friends are buying without invading each's individual privacy.

The tussle continues. The scale of the web will always require computers to do the heavy lifting, yet sometimes people power is the only thing that makes sense.