It's a mad dash to your desktop.  Search engines are gearing up for desktop or personalized search.     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

There's been a change recently in all the search engine talk as the major search engines reposition themselves for future changes. The big thing that everybody is jabbering about is desktop search or personalized search. There have been rumblings from MSN, Google and Yahoo and a few minor players too. What they all want is to get to your desktop and be your all inclusive search for anything from your computer to the web. This is what you'll be hearing more and more about in the coming months and into the early part of 2005. A desktop or a personalized search will be a search algorithm that might be quite unique to you, your searching habits and even what documents you have on your computer. It's all a way to deliver more relevant results for the searcher, but will this make it harder to promote your website?

It could be true that doing a web promotion may be more difficult than it has been in the past. I think that search engines are trying to find ways to eliminate spam sites that have been using unethical techniques to fool them in the past. If it means getting rid of those kind of techniques, making them obsolete, then I'm all for it. What I think it does mean to people who want to get higher rankings for their website, is that they must create superior content which will make it more attractive to people searching. So if this theory is true, then webmasters who have been following good practices won't have to worry whether someone is using a personalized or standard search. As you may have read in some of my other articles, the thing is to create a website that is meant for people, not for search engines. That's what really matters. Does it mean that some of the ways that we've done things in the past will have to change some? Sure, most likely this future trend in search will require some adaptation just like any other changes we experience in life.

The main thing I worry about is not what search engines will become, but rather what kind of moral or ethical detours will they take to extract more personal information. I'm concerned that the lack of privacy will be even more compromised when they know so much more about us. Think about it, search engines will know where we've been, who we e-mail (probably), and what types of documents that we have on our computer. They can talk about being respectful of someone's privacy, but that doesn't mean anything if we agree to their terms. Personalized search could have some advantages to finding better information, but at what price? I would rather use a standard search tool that didn't want to know anything about me. I think that is the way it should be.

Another trend that makes the big three players in search tremble just a bit is the small technology companies that are making a break into the search engine wars. All these companies were small and developed very quickly because of a better mousetrap they made. They also know that there can be a technology that they haven't thought of that will make trouble for them. They could buy a smaller search company to fill a hole, but some of these smaller companies aren't that interested in selling out. Some of them are on a mission. You will see over the next 6 months a proliferation of Google or Yahoo clones that are going to try to grab a piece of the search pie. Don't be surprised if some of their technology actually is better than the big three and more relevant to search. This is going to be a time of greater change and you might see a breakout company doing a better job and becoming a force to be reckoned with. You can check my blog as I write to not only report news but some of the trends in the industry of search.

Once again, this latest round of the search engine wars is all about the dollar. It's a mad dash to your desktop, stripping you of your privacy so they can sell more targeted ads. That's all it is. When you look at it, personalized search doesn't have a lot of advantages over regular search we use today. I hope that we always have a choice, which I think we will, and for my part I choose to use search sources that let me search without knowing everything about me.