Conventional search engines are so frequently used that their spectacular development won’t be a surprise. Search Engine Optimization is now a vital part of every website life, so the Search Engine’s results are also vital for a Web site.

It won’t be the small firms that change the way of search; Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the search engine powerhouses will take search engine technology to the next level.

We are all living a miracle; a simple and affordable device is allowing us to take a topic and scan millions of Web pages and in seconds bring back product announcements, names of experts, research papers, and more, much more… all those results are very difficult or impossible to find otherwise.

The immediate future is even more spectacular. The technology will find a way to personalize the search engines so that they know, for example, that if the user is an IT professional and he is searching for mouse, he is probably in need for information about PC devices than about animals.  This Concept is called QueryTracker.

The next generation of search engines has arrived, the theme engines. Search engines must now fight a losing battle to provide relevant results while combating spamming and duplicate pages. The goal is the same, but the engines need a way to store more pages, combat spam, and still provide pertinent results.

The first generation based the search on what was on the Web page. Important factors, like keywords density and title. Meta tags had an important role, keywords in the domain name, and also some keywords in the URL. Search engines started looking like yellow pages.

The second generation based the page ranking on related links; but it looks like the days of huge link exchange programs are over.

The third generation is already underway, adding word stemming and a thesaurus on top of the term vector database to assist in keeping a search in context. The 3^rd generation search engines will build personal profiles, based on past searching habits and the page vector (the keyword density per page).

The QueryTracker (the search engine submits the user’s query daily and returns the answers – the Web pages that have changed since the previous search or the new ones). The magic in QueryTracker comes from its automatic generation of an additional daily query, based on what it learns about the user’s interests and priorities over time.

QueryTracker’s ability to generate its own searches can compensate for the poorly formed queries that many users write. The most common mistake is that the queries are too short.

Another new direction is the “focus crawler”; making indexes only pages related to the specified topics and then tailors the rankings to the interests of the user. The crawler would get progressively better at building its nightly index by observing the behavior of the searches against it.

It is obvious that lately, the search engines are trying to enhance their results to better anticipate the user’s intentions. Google has the advertisers with its Adwords service, and the technology to determine which results to show within the email interface.

Yahoo is re-vamping Overture (Yahoo Business Services) and Inktomi; Microsoft is already jumping into the search area with Live search. It looks like these search engines powerhouses will enhance the search engine experience and take search engine technology to the next level.

The future of search engine is based on the fact that users want information to be accessible; they want it relevant and fast. Search engines will be personal assistants, butlers, guides and gurus, able to provide potential answers to most difficult questions. Search engines of the future will permeate much more aspects of our lives, becoming more localized, persuasive and personalized.

The “Google inside” mobile is not anymore a future project, such mobile could have voice controlled search functionally that search for results that are pertinent to the current location on a GPS map. Mobile communications device manufacturers bundle voice controlled Web searching features into their phones and PDAs.

We can imagine also our kitchen appliances: search for recipe, for airplane seats – search for places to go when someone arrives at the travel destination, or do a local search to find a repair service.

The trend is the personalization, the use of all data that the search engines are capturing about their users. Craig Silverstein of Google has a vision that in 300 years, search engines will be more like yeast based search pets that understand human inferences, feelings and emotions.

Gerry Campbell, general manager of AOL Search and Navigation gave another example: the AOL’s current search learns from their users’ habits and location and uses that information to provide more relevant search results.

At this point, an important question to consider is how much information a search engine should be allowed to collect about user before the user’s privacy is violated. My feeling on this issue is that I want the search engines to surprise me with spectacular results. If the search engines of the future will know more about a user, they will present more focused search results, as good as the user’s query.

Michaela Campbell, author of popular books, defines a theme engine as “what you say about your Web page, how the structure of other people’s Web pages compares on the same topic, and what other people say your site is about, to be in harmony with each other, be as one.

A theme engine looks at all the information on a seed set, or a group of sites and pages that it has already spidered and has in its index. It assigns each page in the index a number or page vector. This becomes the core of the search engine.

Then the search engine adds and calculates words and incoming links to the page, making sure they match up to the term vector, what the search engine has determined that the page is about, must match what the rest of the Internet says your page is about in their links to you. The next step is to establish the stats and cache data. If the site is one of a search engine’s top exit pages, it must be good, because people don’t come back and search some more once they have found your site.  If the site gets searched and clicked on so often that it is in the engine’s cache for speedy data retrieval, the site must be very good indeed.

The idea is the theme based search engine is looking for unanimous approval that the site is about a particular topic; the more narrow the focus on that topic, the better the site will do. In Campbell’s opinion, all search engines are moving toward being theme based.

Search engines providers are waiting for billions of dollars to have some of the smartest people in the world working to develop the next great version to enhance more relevant results.

Satellite and aerial imagery are these days the main attraction (Google Maps, Google Earth, MSN Virtual Earth, TerraFly, and World Wind from NASA); this is the stepping-stone to real-time and interactive imagery from space.  Real time, high-resolution images delivered over the Internet, showing details such as backyards or streets are the present and the future for the main search engines.

The search engines are getting smarter and more powerful. Such complex and powerful searches will be practical in three to five years when computers are more powerful.