At the  Search Marketing Expo in New York earlier this week, search engines Google and Yahoo made a couple of shocking revelations. The first announcement pertains to the canonical tag, which is a collaborative effort from the engines.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing, and later Ask, all joined together to allow users to dictate which of the duplicate pages on their site they want the search engines to list. While users find the tag useful for internal purposes, users have been asking for an external solution for many years. Users want to be able to control which page is listed across multiple domains as well.

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Where do you see the search industry heading in the future? SEOs and SEMs are notorious for asking this question, since the industry changes so rapidly. As a result of both user and technology advances, the industry must constantly be looking forward in order to be effective in current efforts.

Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts relates the Law of Accelerating Returns to the future of search. Humans think linearly and cannot, therefore, discern their placement on the earth at all times. As a result, the human perception of the future of technology is not entirely accurate. In other words, technology in the future will advance to a much greater level than what humans can currently comprehend.

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The stability in the future of search has recently been put into question due to the impact of social media on search. Since people are doing more and more searches on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, does it mean that social media will eventually replace search engines?

Both Twitter and Facebook have launched real-time search engines within their service offerings, and the major search engines are still struggling to enter the real-time search arena. Heather Dougherty, the Research Director at Hitwise, said:

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Twitter launched a new homepage last week. The redesign contains many new features, but the most prominent one, by far, is the search box.

Twitter says the new design is one effort the company is taking to help new users and people unfamiliar with the site better understand what the service offers. Aside from the sleek new color scheme, Twitter's homepage also sports a new slogan. Instead of "What are you doing?" the new company slogan reads "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world."

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This may or may not be true but I have noticed this more than once on my sites now that  if you add Google Search Box (from Google Adsense Account) or Google Coop search box, your site gets crawled and indexed by google much faster.

For example One of my blog Beats of India is only few weeks old. I am adding daily content to it and have added more than 50 articles into it but because the domain is so new and there are NO backlinks to it, google was showing only 12 pages indexed right from start. Than I decided to add Google co-op and *bang* in less than 48 hours it started showing 78 pages.

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