FOLLOW US INTO the future to a time when buyers and sellers flawlessly find one another through the perfect search engine. The opposite ends of commerce have finally bridged the gap between expectations and actual supplies and demands. Companies know the purchasing potential and preferences of their buyers, having long ago ceased pushing unwanted goods on uninterested consumers.

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A simple Web search can reveal interested buyers, and consumers can find the perfect article, tailored to their lifestyle and income. Moreover, intelligent appliances automatically select the best offer, post orders, and issue maintenance calls. In this somewhat disturbing scenario of a society isolated in technological perfection, unfailingly finding a business counterpart has replaced the uncertainty of today's Web search mechanisms.

Even if this dark vision is best left to science fiction stories, companies and consumers alike could benefit from search engines that approach this level of accuracy. Current search engines do a pretty good job of searching, but actually finding things requires relentless perseverance to browse countless Web pages and, all too often, a stroke of luck.

An interesting approach to improving Web searches -- just now being seen in a few implementations -- is to filter the search using personal data such as age, gender, income, or location, then compare it to data of users with similar profiles. Unfortunately, most casual users of the Internet are reluctant to undergo a registration process.

H5 Technologies proposes one of the more innovative approaches to making searches more reliable. H5 applies the concept of bar coding to text files, creating a synthetic profile by matching words in the search text with a 400,000-word vocabulary and assigning categories of knowledge to documents. The resulting bar code is a concise summary of the original text to compare against other documents and to use for targeted searches.

Future Web searches will not be limited to text but extended to multimedia files. For example, a recent release of Inktomi's Search Software extends support of contextual searches over various data sources, including databases, Microsoft PowerPoint documents, and Adobe PDF files.

If you seek alternatives to the flat appearance and slow pace of current search results pages, Inxight offers two graphical metaphors, Star Tree and Table Lens, to display large amounts of information on a Web page. Star Tree mimics the appearance of a cobweb to present data as a network of icons, which are faster to navigate than conventional, multipage lists. Table Lens displays summaries of large tables and allows instant zoom-in. Both technologies make it easier to browse complex data.

No matter how much Web search engines improve, they will never be able to provide a single perfect answer to a question or search. Nevertheless, better Web searching technologies promise to generate more revenue and increase customer loyalty by making it easier for products and customers to find one another.