Latest internet applications can collate data from disparate sources and answer video and music query terms, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

Imagine a woman standing next to a man who says: "I do". She takes the precaution of using her mobile phone to take his photograph and instructs it to do a quick search.

A national tradesman's database confirms from the photograph that the man is, indeed, a plumber and fixes sinks.

She sees a high number of hits alongside his photograph from satisfied customers, and she decides to hire him to fix a leak in her bathroom.

The use of search engines to help us conduct everyday activities is on the increase but "so what?" you might say, inured to change now that you've been using a search engine for five years or so.

For the past two millenniums, when we wanted information we used such arcane technologies as asking questions, looking up references in catalogues or browsing newspapers - and now we surf websites.

The personal and commercial significance of search, though, tends to be overshadowed by the celebrity of Google.

In the commercial world, hidden from the gaze of what we used to call internet surfers, search technology is beginning to do things that make Google's technology look simple, and, in the process, it is laying the foundations for the types of searches we'll conduct in the near future.

Imagine, for example, your company's disparate information sources being readily "integrated" - or displayed - on the desktop or mobile device of any employee or customer?

For those not employed by large organisations, it may be difficult to imagine that disparate information sources present a problem.

However, there are about 300 different file types in company data stores. Their systems were generally designed before video, images and sounds were considered important. Most desktop applications read, play or display very few file types. Some 290 of the 300 might as well be invisible.

Take another example: imagine a time when electronic democracy - "e-democracy"- works. Voters will want access, not just to an electronic voting form, but also to the archives of speeches made by candidates and senior politicians, to their manifestoes, television interviews, public appearances, and perhaps even their Dáil voting records.

E-democracy will rely on all those disparate sources being complete, authentic and reliably retrievable and displayed.

In neither example is the data likely, currently, to be stored in a way that is retrievable and displayable with one query, but the modern search engine is increasingly able to provide this service.

By virtually integrating disparate commercial information, search technology is replacing the work only available with costly upgrades and complex software integration projects.

Companies can now opt for a search engine that refuses to be browbeaten by different file formats, proprietary databases or diverse media types.

However, the increased demand to search in multimedia formats will transform search technology. The lady in need of a plumber is an example of how we will all benefit from technological advances that are already underway.

It is possible now to use mixed media search queries, ie to use an image or a sound to retrieve relevant information.

Researchers are also using "scenes" and "characters" as query inputs in multimedia searches.

Input a short video clip of an actor as a query term, and you can retrieve examples of the actor in other films, his or her biography and filmograph.

Hum a few bars from a symphony, and retrieve the title and composer. Although the latter application of search technology is still fanciful, the rest is already being done.

These are trivial applications, but technology is being driven by the sheer volume of our trivial needs. Blogging and podcasting are relatively trivial pursuits that are transforming the scale of the internet, and they also offer clues as to how search will change.

As it stands, internet searching means that we enter a pact with our chosen search engine that we are happy to accept a link on the first page of a search return as the closest we are going to get to what we are looking for.

Most internet users go no further than that and seem happy with it. The holy grail is a degree of relevance that delivers a search return full of new and useful information from disparate media sources, and displays it in an intuitively comprehensible way.

In the past, we've relied on metadata to help us to secure relevance. Metadata are descriptions of web pages that tell search engines what a website or document is about.

In the future, they will be too complex to produce because the data will be a film, a song or a podcast, all of which are difficult to describe on the scale required by search technology.

Instead, it will be our behaviour around those items that informs the search engine.

We collectively pass judgment on the relevance and quality of web information by our willingness to form groups or networks around it.

Whereas Google advanced the art of searching by using links between websites to improve relevance, in the future we'll use the analysis of our own network behaviour.

We create a kind of index every time more than one of us uses a website or accesses a document.

The more of us who use those entities for different purposes, the more varied and usable our implicit judgments become.

The likelihood of, for example, finding the name of an actor in a film about plumbers might be vastly improved by having access to the search patterns of people with a passion for men who fix sinks.

The killer application for technology always resides somewhere in our everyday activities, but now so too does the actual technology itself.

Haydn Shaughnessy was the rapporteur at a recent EU workshop on the challenges of future search engines. In addition to writing for The Irish Times, he has designed search tools based on social networks.