Search engines have come a long way since they were first created in the early 1990's. The search engine industry is still booming and corporate giants know there's still a lot of money to be made, so everyone's looking for that little extra something that will give them the cutting edge over their rivals. One could question the growth potential of modern search engines, but there's always room for improvement.



One of the drawbacks of modern search engines is that some of the results produced could be irrelevant to the query entered by the user. In order to overcome this problem, some companies, such as Yahoo! employ people to manually check that the results produced in searches are relevant, and thus improve the algorithm used. This makes the search engine's reliability optimal, but is it enough?

In order to overcome this, IBM has developed an algorithm, Clever, which promises to change internet searching as we know it. In the words of IBM itself: "[Clever is] an advanced algorithm that improves the performance of Internet search engines by allowing them to automatically distil a set of documents representing the most authoritative and relevant information on a requested subject." This, in effect, takes the need for human intervention out of the picture. Even though it's still not publicly distributed, its potential looks very promising indeed.

Modern search engines are already a bit more ?clever? than they used to be. For example, when a query doesn't produce any results, the search engine suggests an alternative search that is known to produce results. This is helpful in the case of a typo, but what happens when the user is looking for something using the wrong words? For example, let's say someone has entered the query "The White Home", and is hoping to find information on the White House. It is very unlikely that any modern search engine will produce results concerning the US president's residence.

However, researchers claim that this is about to change. Up until now, it has been very difficult for humans to implement the laws of human speech on a computer. Linguists and computer scientists are working together towards that goal. A search engine would perform a lexical and logical analysis on the given query and list results containing synonyms of the words entered. That would be very helpful for non-native English speakers as well as those of us who simply forget brand names, film titles, names of landmarks, etc.

Advances such as these may seem a million miles away from search engines? humble pre-web beginnings, but they really are just around the corner. The new generation of search engines will signify the new era of human-computer interaction and will change the way we experience the Internet forever.