Year 2010, Pradeep was wrangling with many GBs of xml files containing the data of Computer Science research authors. The goal was to build search on top of this data providing insights into their data. Apache Lucene and Solr were the leading search software space. Forget about the semantic search, the keyword search was a distant dream for a young developer like Pradeep. Fast forward to 2025, the search software ecosystem has evolved to the level where a young inexperienced developer can easily build multimodal AI-powered search within few days. In this session, Pradeep shares insights about how search systems, algorithms, and the entire search software ecosystem has evolved. We will also cover what are the challenges that are yet to be addressed, and how you and projects like Open Search play an important role in the future search journey.