Future Search Engines

The current trend of search engines, especially google, is to provide a more localised search with improved context awareness provided through through the semantic web framework. The affect this has on search engine optimisation will be to offer more techniques in which to provide such information to those search engines.

Localisation and context improvments in search engine rankings involves trying to better anticipate the person's needs. Google currently does this by offering the option to save search history and then offers up suggestions based on the statistics you have provided through google history. The semanitc web involves using a number of languages to improve the quality of indexing websites more accurately and quickly. Currently Yahoo is the only major search engine that uses Semantic Web protocols.
The ability of google to provide local search information based on the user's location settings is also an attempt to improve the localisation of SERPS. Google maps is the best example of this with
Business 1st appearing on the Lancaster, UK map together with business-1st address, website and telephone number information. This type of geotargeting is also possible without use intervention by the search engine performing an IP lookup and prioritising websites based in the UK for searchs originating from the UK. This is also used to serve PPC (pay per click) internet marketing that is targeted at specific locations.

Google prefers the use of IP lookups to determine the location of a website because many websites (such as business 1st) use ".com" TLDs. But even IP lookups are not effective if the webpage is also hosted in a foreign country.

Context and personalisation of the search engine results was started by google with its personalised homepage and web history options. It means that a different set of results will appear in SERPS if you use the service compared to if you do not use the service. Microsoft also made a similar copy of google's Web History and Google Desktop Search in what was called "What I've Seen" which was then integrated into Windows Desktop Search and now evolved to PHLAT.

The semantic web is an attempt to add an extra layer of protocols to provide more data about webpages. Yahoo was the first to read RDF Site Summery (RSS) files and Yahoo Pipes uses XML based RSS feeds from websites. Atom is the google version of RSS feeds which is intended to provide structured data about websites. This is useful for keeping up to date with new products available on ecommerce online shop websites for example.

A setback to personalised search engine results is the privacy concerns, especially with regards to the recent cases of the UK government loosing sensitive personal information stored electronically. But as more people start using personalised search, search engine optimization companies will have to start offering products such as RSS and RDS Site Summaries.