The ACM Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval (SIGIR) has thier SIGIR 2006 Draft Call for Papers out already. The conference will be in Seattle next August.
SIGIR is one of the best academic conferences to keep up with what’s new and what’s possible for Web search and increasingly, in Desktop search and mobile device search. For 2006 I expect we will see more about vertical search and even blog search too as well as some new insights into user behavior for IR.