Yes.  ESRI is investing in three areas:

1. Making ArcGIS services more search aware with searchable metadata.
2. Supporting the FGDC and INSPIRE-driven requirements for geospatial metadata portals.
3. Supporting end users’ search for data and resources.

Searchable Metadata - In 9.3, ArcGIS Server exposes HTML-based searchable metadata for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  This is built into the server and will expose metadata automatically unless turned off.

Portal Toolkit – At 9.3, ESRI is releasing its newest version of the geospatial portal toolkit built on ArcGIS Server. This toolkit is designed to support different metadata standards and is thus ready for upcoming specifications such as the North American Profile of ISO metadata (an initiative from US FGDC and GeoConnections Canada), as well as the European INSPIRE initiative. The collection of metadata published to the geospatial portal toolkit is discoverable through OGC-compliant catalog services as well as through a commonly-used web search standard called OpenSearch.  ArcGIS Desktop includes an editor to create and maintain metadata to be served in this toolkit system.

Search - At 9.4, ESRI is launching an ambitious effort to have search capabilities deeply integrated into all elements of ArcGIS. This will allow users to automatically create and discover various GIS resources using simple search tools.  Users will have search tools integrated in their desktop that search local files, workgroup servers, enterprise servers and the open Web.  For example, a user may need a water resources data set in England. He would simply type that in and search.  This will require that ArcGIS automatically stamp simple discoverable metadata on all objects that it touches—data, models, maps, workflows, documents, etc.