What exactly is a Web Search Engine?

Alternative Search Engines .com asserts that users of the next decade will expect many more features.

  1. Personalization (but without storing personal info )
  2. Social Input / Wisdom-of-Crowds / Collaborative discovery
  3. Semantic Processing
  4. Parametric Input: including freshness, source and domain-specific
  5. Rich content types: audio, video, images, news, blogs, …
  6. UI enhancements
  7. Findability support
  8. Follow-up: results clustering and drill-down
  9. Repeat queries
  10. Trusted sources: e.g. a slider to select the level of trust, from high to low