When you look at current trends in search, you must also look at the roles social media and real-time search are currently playing in the industry. As Mike Grehan of Incisive Media researched his thought paper, “New Signals to Search Engines,” he looked at these very areas.

Grehan found that IBM wrote an algorithm that looks at Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace and filters out all the noise to find the real conversation. Incidentally, the BBC uses this technology to rate music.

The BBC has published the top 40 records based on retail sales and airplay for many years. However, through BBC Sound Index, they now publish the top 40 records based on what is current and what people are talking about and downloading online.

It is technologies such as this that will be keys to the future of search. Last year, Google announced that it had found more than 1 trillion links, and as Grehan points out, that is but a mere fraction of the Web. Because there is so much more information online, the real issue now is finding those new signals to send to the engines.

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