As 2005 winds to a stop, it's time to take a week-long look at one of the biggest interactive moneymakers: SEM.

Last June at our Integrate '05 event I had the pleasure of running some numbers for our attendees about recent changes in the entertainment marketing mix.

Here is one of the slides from that presentation, from our friends at eMarketer:

According to the chart, search, specifically paid search or SEM, is the biggest moneymaker in interactive marketing, and eMarketer predicts that it will shoot from a nearly four billion dollar business in 2004 to more than nine-and-a-half billion dollars in 2009.

And that's just search as we understand it today. How will SEM change in the coming days of local search, GPS and RFID-equipped mobile search, and the general decline of desktop- and laptop-based computing? It's anybody's guess.

This week, we've invited five talented search practitioners to share their views on search marketing, how to do it right, and what's going to happen.

Sean Cummings, Dipsie's VP of product development, kicks off Search Week by telling us how search can -- and more importantly cannot -- build brands.

Then, Ron Belanger, Yahoo!'s senior director of global advertiser strategy and development, weighs in with a different perspective, arguing that smart search can indeed build brands and more, but that it takes clever copy and smart strategy that thinks "outside the funnel." (Don't miss Ron's amusing White Castle campaign example.)

In weekly SearchTHIS column on Wednesday, iMedia Search Editor Kevin Ryan weighs in on how recent changes at Google are going to make times interesting for paid search management companies (and remember the old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times).