Future of the Web

Google Australia engineering and site director Alan Noble says there are a couple of "pretty amazing" trends developing, including a move toward gadgets, mini-applications, and widgets. He says applications are being improved by gadgets by democratizing them and making it possible for developers to disaggregate applications in a completely new way. He says another major trend is a shift toward cloud computing, which he believes will have profound implications. He says Google has "taken a whole range of applications that users traditionally thought of as client-side applications and moved them online ... It basically means you have access to your applications anytime, anywhere." Noble says there are still a lot more applications that need to be moved to the cloud, but the trend towards cloud computing is clear. As for the future of Web content and rich content Web searchers, Noble admits that video and image searching techniques are rudimentary, but the technology is improving. Noble cites research at the University of Queensland in Australia that has been able to classify videos and detect similarities with other videos. He says the Internet is becoming richer and being able to search through rich content will be crucial.