The future of search engines

So I have all these technology news things on my Google page and even though most of the headlines don't interest me, almost every day there's something really cool and new to read about. I think I'll start sharing those things. Today's article was about the future of search engines (click the title of this post to read the article) - they're moving toward a more intelligent kind of searching that will be able to do much more than the keyword searches we have now. The websites the article talks about are still being tweaked, but you can play with them to get an idea of how they work: Medstory focuses on medical information, and what makes the search intelligent is that it finds webpages and groups them according to what information they provide about your search. For example, searching "arthritis" brings up groups of results that address Drugs, Conditions, Nutrition, Procedures, and People that have something to do with arthritis. Riya is even cooler. With a Google image search, you search for a word and your results are all photos with your search term wither in the name of the image file or somewhere near it on the webpage. This means that when you search "dog", you're not getting all those pictures that are still named "DSC74394" from someone's digital camera, especially if the word "dog" isn't on the page anywhere. Riya, on the other hand, uses an algorithm to scan the image itself and compare key features with those of other images. This is much like the facial recognition software you see on your favorite primetime crime drama, but it does "places" and "things", as well. It also lets you specify a location for the photo (using Google Maps). When you upload photos (you have to download a program that will upload photos for you, but it can only upload from a folder, not one image at a time), they're stored an made available as results for other peoples' searches. This scared me a little, considering that there are so many photos of kids, tagged with the kids' names, and some even specify a location. How much easier could they make it for a pedophile? In light of that, I tried uploading some photos of cats, but it didn't recognize anything in them so the search was pretty useless. Oh well.