Search is dead. Or at least that's the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I've been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multi-billion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley's Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there's a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet-one that may leave the Web's biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy in to anymore.