The future of search will effect everybody’s live in a much more powerful way then the appearance of the Internet or the search engines it brought with it. Most experts in the search industry agree that search as a working system is only 5% solved and that personalization is going to be the key driver to change the way search works today.



Assumptions about how to display search engine results pages to users are undergoing a constant transformation. Searching in the future will include self-learning software so that it would calculate the probability that a given user typing "apple" meant a company and not the fruit. And Google is using IP address identification to target user with country specific results.

But the future of search will influence much more than just the way we use text based computer searches. It will influence our daily live. Already we can see cars that are calling the manufacturer if they analyze a problem within the vehicle. We see Internet service provider partnering with cable companies (or buying them). Few realize that all of these seemingly unrelated events are all steps in the same direction: a world in which every medium will be connected in one way or the other to a network to exchange and store information.

Search your fridge content through the Internet? The refrigerator that knows what content it holds is almost old news. The next logical step is to make this information available to the owner through the Internet. And it is not Sci-Fi but a very realistic scenario that your refrigerator (and soon other household appliances) will send you an email about missing juice or expired mayonnaise. Or maybe you already signed up for the ‘always full’ option at your local grocery store and the supplies you need, will be waiting in a cooler in front of your door.

Millions of people are already searching to endless libraries of other people’s stored audio and video files. How convenient would it be to have a personal search engine that knows my music taste and delivers just that (directly to my iPod)? And we may not have to zap through hundreds of television channels much longer to find the one show we really want to watch. The television set that ‘learns’ my user behavior and suggest only the programs that fit my taste are probably already realty in some lab over at SONY making Yahoo’s recent partnership with TIVO obsolete.

But the future of search will also need to keep the little guys in mind as well as the local communities. Whereas today most small companies are still not available online, clever services start to appear that helps even the smallest company to surface in Google and Yahoo searches. The best example is a new service called LOXTER. LOXTER is an interactive online directory that combines the power of local search and online community. Christian Kameir of San Diego’s Internet marketing company, Colizer Inc explains: “Businesses that are listed in LOXTER are more likely to come up in searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN. The reason for this is that the unique structure of the LOXTER portals allows users to connect to the business for free, using a click-to-call feature and leave verified feedback about their experience – valuable information that is not available anywhere else on the Internet." - This seems to be a real Yellow Page alternative.

The future of search will also be in every single thing you come in contact with. It means if I need to loose weight I will not use Google to research diet plans but tell my car that I want to loose five pounds and it will email my refrigerator to replace regular Bud with the light version and throw out the salami.