With all the advances and artificial intelligence applications Google has done in the last years, it is agreed they have set the standard to follow by other companies, in the challenge of developing the smartest search engine. So... What is next? Were do we go from here? The application of new techniques of Artificial Intelligence such as query expansions, object recognitions, and new natural language selections, will definitely impact how searches are performed and the capacity of the retrieval engines of learning even more based on stats info, therefore improving even further the machine learning process.
Keyword reliance on text based content ranking is not the only indexable content new comers are targeting. Images and video are areas were recognition, classification and scoring are maturing, opening many new optimization opportunities levels we didn't think possible in the past. So there is going to be more in the future of search results than just clusters of words in a document connected by links to other clusters. Also in the applications, object recognition like images would invaluable just to give an example to law enforcement, to find positive matches on open cases.
The biggest obstacle commercial search engines need to overcome is scaling given all the computational requirements of these technologies. That is why Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and other methods are simply impractical to implement, despite the incorrect believe of many SEOs outhere that they are actually in effect today.
http://www.articlecube.com/Article/New-Search-Engine-Intelligence/160662
