Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems says that at last we’re able to combine structured and unstructured search, so that (for example) a search for a customer will find transaction records in the database and emails the customer may have exchanged with customer support.

James Robertson of Step Two Designs explains why “search sucks,” and how it can be kept simple and made more effective if the implementers do more work up front.

Sandeep Swadia, head of Search Business Consulting for Fast, talks about the intersection of customer needs for search and the evolving media business model.

John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast, talks about who is a bigger competitor, Oracle or Google, and the ways in which Fast internally is a Web 2.0 company…wikis and blogs, emerging bottom-up.

Zia Zaman, SVP of Strategic Marketing at Fast, talks about search as the visible surface of deep business processes, and what this means for Fast as a partner.

Hadley Reynolds, VP of Fast’s Center of Search Innovation, discusses the implications of the fact that in enabling sites to provide us with highly relevant results, we may trade-off some of our privacy.

Jim McGee of Huron Consulting Group talks about the need for businesses to allow employees time to think, and the extent to which thinking can be done in the social public of blogs.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail talks about when taxonomies, text search and tagging works, and how this applies to a magazine site. And what about tagging’s own long tail?

David Watson, VP of Product Design and Development for Digital Media at Disney/ABC, talks about the role of user-generated metadata in guiding people toward his company’s content. Look for looser licensing of news content before creative content.