When discussing the future of search, the conversation inevitably turns to Star Trek. Or Iron Man, or 2001, or the Superfriends, or whatever your preferred geek culture touchpoint happens to be.

This nexus of tech, sci-fi and advertising is often informed by several core fantasies/business plans. Imagine if you could talk to your computer, ask it any question you needed answered, and it would talk right back to you with intelligently gathered search results. The concept has popped up in numerous sci-fi and superhero yarns for decades. But now it's also the kind of thing that various search visionaries seriously talk about when pondering where the medium will be five years from now.

Indeed, as comprehensively awesome as Google and its competitors are at sorting through massive quantities of information (just how exactly did we find things 10 years ago? Books?), many digital industry executives and entrepreneurs believe that, overall, search will evolve and improve dramatically by the middle of the next decade.

Talking computers is just one avenue experts predict search will take. Many theorize that search engines will be able to provide more personalized results based on previous searches (something that's already been talked about for a while). Some speculate that social networking sites will become the new focal point of search. Others say the medium will shift to mobile devices.

Many of those who are looking to challenge Google predict that search interfaces will become far more user friendly -- either by becoming more visual, or more conversational and less keyword-oriented. A few believe strongly that artificial intelligence will shove aside the algorithm as the core search technology.

Looking five years down the road, "the things I think about are social and mobile," says Troy Mastin, a former William Blair & Co. analyst who's covered the Internet for more than a decade. Mastin has recently noticed the growing Facebook phenomenon where users are sending out queries to their friend circles -- queries that in the past might have been handled by search.

With social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo Answers, "There is this whole new wave of information being shared," says Mastin. "Whether that is monetizable is not clear. But that is information that could be indexed and searched somehow."

Nick Beil, CEO of the search specialty agency Performics, says that while the personalized search concept is nothing new, he finally sees it coming closer to fruition -- in part because of sites like Facebook, which allow brands to narrowly target ads by age, location, interest, etc.

"Today, [search] is a one-size-fits-all model where you want to be No. 1 as an advertiser," says Beil. "In the future, being No. 1 in natural search results will be less relevant. You may only want to be No. 1 for certain segments of the population. The targeting capabilities are going to look a lot more like Facebook. The challenge is how to get scale."

Another segment where scale is currently limited but has serious potential is mobile. Web-ready devices like the popular iPhone are already starting to make searching via mobile devices a lot more appealing to consumers, according to Mastin.



"We're passing some key inflection points with mobile," he says. "And mobile can really accelerate search's growth."

Brad Bostic, president and co-founder of the mobile search upstart ChaCha, believes that five years from now mobile search usage and ad spending will dwarf Web search. "There is a greater need for access to information when on the go," he says.

For mobile search to really take off, Bostic says it has to incorporate some sort of human element. ChaCha uses actual human guides to help traffic search queries.

"Sometimes you are better off calling a friend," he says. "There is a challenge of relevance in search."

Relevance, along with usability, are still major issues for many Web searchers today -- despite how precise Google's product appears to be.

According to a recent J.P. Morgan survey, 62 percent of its respondents (the majority of whom said they were Google loyalists) said they'd be willing to switch search engines. And 45 percent said they'd switch for "results that better matched the search term." More than a quarter said they'd jump ship for a search engine that was more user friendly.

Given that sentiment, many startups are challenging Google with what they believe are the search products and tools of the future.

Cuil.com, which launched last summer to much fanfare and almost as much blogger backlash, claims it already indexes more total Web pages than Google. Founder and CEO Tom Costello predicts that over the next five years, as more government documents, copyrighted material and historical texts make their way online, "The Internet is going to grow in size and scope," he says. "There will be a big emphasis on credibility. Search engines won't be able to just give you information and say 'Hey, make the best of it.' Search engines are going to have to show their sources."

Not only does another search engine, Searchme, show users what sources its results come from, it shows them actual Web pages before they make one click. The idea is to create a search experience that is more multimedia friendly, and even fun -- particularly for those who don't really like search in its current state.

"Some people want a list of links," says Randy Adams, CEO of the recently launched Searchme. "But that's not what a lot of people want. Broadband provides an opportunity to provide richer general results. We're just trying to build a better mousetrap."



Of course, Google rival Microsoft has been trying to build a better mousetrap for years. But the software giant's well-regarded adCenter platform has yet to take off as planned because there simply aren't enough people using MSN's search product.

However, Microsoft gave the industry a clue about where it thinks search is headed last July when it acquired Powerset, one of several startup companies that specialize in semantic search.

Semantic search (sometimes referred to as linguistic) promises to be able to infer the intended meaning of search queries that take the form of full questions. Theoretically, semantic searches deliver more relevant results than keyword searches, since they're based on the frequency of particular words' occurrences, coupled with the popularity of Web pages.

"It is a stepping-stone to artificial intelligence," said Powerset co-founder Barney Pell, who's now partner, search strategy and evangelist at Microsoft.

Pell predicts that in five years, keywords will no longer drive the search ad economy, as advertisers will -- in a sense -- be able to purchase ads that factor in user intent.

Another company bullish on semantic search is four-year-old hakia, which is backed by over $20 million in funding and led by former U.S. government scientist Riza Berkan. Berkan believes that once hakia.com is perfected (it's presently in beta testing), it will perform better and be easier to use than what some describe as a monolithic Google.

According to Berkan, Google's popularity-based product falls miserably short in the Web's long tail, where semantic could excel. Also, Google's model isn't always fast enough to track dynamic content like breaking news and live blog entries. The semantic tools hakia is designing are, says Berkan.

Of course, in the current search landscape, where the Google brand is generally beloved by consumers, and the capital-rich company only continues to gain market share, skepticism abounds as to whether anybody can truly catch up. While most hesitate to declare "game over," many doubt that a new search engine can beat Google's technology, let alone get consumers to drop a behavior that is already so ingrained that its become a part of the verbal lexicon , i.e. to "Google" something.

"There is always going to be somebody with a great idea that gets funding," says Performics' Beil, who maintains doubts about semantic search in particular. "What nobody knows is what is going to get widespread adoption? Three years ago there were a lot of companies saying, 'We're a search engine.' And then they get no users."

"The challenge is building a consumer brand," continues Beil. "If Microsoft keeps losing share, how is a startup going to get there? It's hard when Google is a verb."



Of course, those looking to eat into Google's dominance don't see it that way. "Whenever I hear people say that we've taken a technology as far as it can go and it's over, I think, these people are tired and don't want to innovate anymore," says Searchme's Adams.

Microsoft's Pell cautioned those who doubted that anyone could touch Google by recalling how Google itself came out of nowhere to shake up the just-getting-started search ad industry a decade ago. "People are way too skeptical. It's so easy to get stuck in how the world looks today. Remember when Yahoo dominated search? We're a long way from satisfying consumers completely."

Berkan of hakia has heard the skeptics when it comes to media tech that sounds overly futuristic. "Changing user behavior from one brand to another brand is difficult," he acknowledges. "Just better results is not enough. AskJeeves burned people pretty bad. People have a bad taste; they think artificial intelligence is bad."

Berkan predicts users will move to conversational search engines that actually talk to them. "Like chat rooms. Like Star Trek. Consumers already have the habit," he says. "You just need to provide them with the right interface, the right visual clues."

If he's even a little bit right, couldn't Google just adapt its tools? Berkan says that semantic search needs to be built from the ground up. "You can't just do a patch job," he says. "It's a very difficult technology to produce. It's a total breakthrough. This is just the beginning of search."

Or perhaps the final frontier.