Surfing Tomorrow's Internet

The kind of information we're accessing is changing, with search engines indexing everything from databases to printed material and software harnessing the power of social networking. The Internet is evolving. But what will it change into - and how will we use it?

More, more, more

For years, web searching was limited to the content of web pages - so when we looked for something, we were only looking at a tiny proportion of the information available online. Huge amounts of data were locked in the 'deep web', far from the reach of search engine spiders, and even more data was stored in formats such as audio and video clips that search engines couldn't scan.

Suddenly, though, things are changing. Google improved its indexing of Flash files in the summer of 2008, and its spiders can now see any textual content hidden within them. Both Google and Windows Live Search have also implemented basic face detection technology in their image search services, and Google began experimenting with ways to access the deep web in early 2008. Its spiders can now automatically fill out online forms to access hitherto spider-unfriendly data on 'certain sites', although Google doesn't say which ones.

We'll soon be able to search the content of multimedia files, too. During the US Presidential campaign, Google unveiled Gaudi, an audio indexing service that enables you to search not just the data about video clips - the filename, user tags and so on - but the actual content of the clip. Want to know how many times Barack Obama mentioned change in a single speech? Gaudi can tell you. Google is also indexing books and magazines through its Google Book Search service. For now, its efforts are largely US-based, but the long-term aim is to digitise any print title you can imagine and make it searchable online.

Last but not least, there's Twitter. Bear with us here: we're about to suggest that Twitter is going to be a big part of the web's future. While it's easy - and often entirely justified - to dismiss the micro-blogging service as a massive waste of time, it's possible to see it in a different way. We're thinking Google for brains.

Because Twitter is an ongoing conversation, its search page makes it an extraordinarily powerful real-time search engine. Traditional search engines can't index information before it's published, but a Twitter search enables you to search conversations as they happen. When they're talking about something important, such as a breaking news story that hasn't reached the mainstream media, Twitter provides information that you simply can't get anywhere else.

The result of all this is that we can access more data, from more sources - and from more locations - than ever before. The challenge is to make sense of it.

Where it's at

The more data you have, the harder it becomes to filter it. One way to reduce information overload is geolocation, where a search engine or site works out roughly where you are from your IP address and directs you to the most local site - so when you access Google or Windows Live Search from a UK IP address, the search engines will direct you to the UK site and give UK-specific results extra weighting.

This sort of geolocation is a fairly blunt instrument, but when GPS-enabled mobile phones and technology such as Skyhook (which can work out your location from Wi-Fi access points and mobile phone towers) can pinpoint you to a particular town or even address, it's possible to serve up extremely relevant results - especially for shopping, points of interest and other everyday information.

Although location awareness is best suited to mobile devices, there's no reason why it can't be used on the desktop too. Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system (see our Snow Leopard review) includes location-based services for all computers, not just mobile ones, and Google's Latitude location-based service can be accessed from desktop PCs as well as mobile phones. As with other Google services, we'd expect the firm to publish an API so that developers can use Latitude for their own services, although for now it's more of a curiosity than a useful application.

You can also improve the relevance of search in other ways. If you sign into Google, you'll see icons next to each search result, enabling you to tell the company which sites you like and which ones you don't. If you wish, you can also get Google to track your browsing history, enabling you to refine search results based on what Google thinks you'll like. As the amount of information we want to access increases, such automated systems - often described as agents - will become a key part of our online lives. However, while software can certainly refine search results, it's not as powerful as a much older technology: the human brain.

People power

When it comes to identifying people in photographs, your social-networking contacts will do a better and faster job than any software algorithm can manage, and if you're looking for recommendations - for products, films, places to go or anything else - people who know you or who have similar interests and tastes will come up with better recommendations than even the most finely tuned recommendation engine could. If you're recruiting for staff then recommendations via a business-focused social network such as LinkedIn could prove more effective than traditional newspaper advertising or an online job ad.

When you combine location-based computing, multiple sources of data and social networking with improvements in hardware, the results can be extraordinary. Imagine being able to point your mobile phone at something and receiving relevant data about that object or place - such as a friend's comments about a restaurant, the history of a particular place, people's photos and videos or more interesting alternatives to where you're currently standing. The hardware is already there - HTC's G1 Android phone has GPS and a compass, making Google Street View positively spooky - and other services are catching up fast.

All together now

Apple is - as always - ahead of the curve. The company is taking some of these ideas and putting them into products that you can buy right now. For example, if you take a photo with an iPhone, you can use the device's GPS chip to identify your location and store it in the photo's metadata. If you then import your photos into the latest iPhoto software, you can use that data to organise your images. The metadata is retained and can be exported to Flickr, where your images can be plotted on a map. iPhoto also includes an agent - in this case facial-recognition software - that can scan your images and identify who's in each picture. The app takes advantage of social networks to help tag the images. Apple has gone with Facebook for this: upload your images to your Facebook account, and when your contacts tag individuals in your photos, that data is downloaded to iPhoto in order to update your photo library.

Other products are less glamorous but more useful. TomTom's latest generation of sat-nav systems use anonymous mobile phone location data to study traffic flow and warn users of snarl-ups. The firm also runs a LIVE service that provides over-the-air information including up-to-date petrol prices, weather forecasts, Google Local search and the ability to share information or send messages to friends.

Cars are also becoming increasingly connected. BMW's ConnectedDrive provides "telematic and online services". This means Google Maps, route planning and a portal where you and your friends can send messages to your car. You can even use the website to unlock your car if you've accidentally left the keys inside.

BMW isn't the only car company hooking its vehicles up to the Internet. Ford's Sync delivers route planning, Internet searching, customised news reports and sports scores. Its equivalent of BMW's remote unlocking gimmick is the Vehicle Health Report, which is called up by saying the words 'vehicle health' and according to Ford includes "diagnostics, scheduled maintenance [and] recall information". The system is currently available as an upgrade for certain models, but the system will be rolled out to the entire US Ford range by the summer and into Europe in 2010. Ford predicts that it will have one million Sync-enabled cars on the road by the third quarter of 2009.

The Internet in everything

Even books are getting in on the act. Amazon's second-generation Kindle ebook reader includes WhisperNet, 3G-based data transmission that automatically downloads content from various sources including newspapers, magazines and blogs. Its WhisperSync service will apparently enable you to browse the same document across multiple devices and browsers without losing your place. While Kindle is still rather basic, forthcoming ebook devices like the Readius offer similar features, better portability and integrated email and RSS readers for instant access to information no matter where you might roam. As electronic paper gets bigger and cheaper, there's no reason why we couldn't have Internet-enabled display advertising in shops or, in the long term, on the side of bus shelters. Or on the buses themselves, for that matter.

Couch potatoes needn't feel left out. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel and Yahoo! showed off televisions with 'widgets', which are sidebar Gadget-style applications providing onscreen access to services such as MySpace, Flickr, Joost and the inevitable weather reports and share price tickers. Intel has carried out lots of research into this area, and found that people didn't want a fully fledged web browser on their TV. What they did want was a way to connect with friends and family, access relevant information and find out more about programmes from the comfort of their sofa. As far as we can tell, they didn't say they wanted more adverts, but of course onscreen widgets will deliver those too.

The Internet everywhere

What all these products have in common is the assumption that Internet access will be everywhere, either piped into the home or via the mobile phone network. Right now that's rather optimistic - if you've ever tried to get a 3G signal a few miles outside a major city, you'll know what we mean - but by 2012 things should be vastly different. In February, Motorola began testing 4G LTE (Long-Term Evolution) in Swindon. The firm hopes to have commercial products on sale later this year. LTE is one of two key candidates to replace 3G - the other is WiMax - and it's the most likely to succeed, as it takes advantage of the existing 3G infrastructure.

With speeds of up to 100Mbps over the mobile phone network, 4G sounds great. But when even 3G coverage is currently patchy in rural areas, will many people be able to get it? It's a similar story with wired broadband: even if the recession doesn't force the company to scale back its plans, BT's roll-out of faster Internet will only reach 10 million homes by 2012, and Virgin's network upgrade will only affect cabled areas.

The good news is that the government is committed to delivering broadband to everyone in the UK. The bad news is that by 'broadband', it doesn't mean 'fast broadband'. Britain's Internet future is outlined in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report, which is currently in the consultation stage. The final report, due this summer, will form the basis of government policy. One of the key recommendations is that the Universal Service Obligation - which currently compels BT to provide a phone service to anybody who wants one - should be expanded to include broadband. Under the proposals, the entire population of the UK would be able to access broadband services at a reasonable price, either via wired broadband - DSL or cable - or over the mobile phone network.

Expanding the USO to cover connectivity is an excellent idea, but don't expect it to deliver high-speed broadband to every home in the UK. While ADSL, cable and 4G could deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps, the proposed USO will only ask for 2Mbps.

The digital divide

The universal service proposals in the Digital Britain report are relatively uncontroversial, and while the details of how it's going to happen are still being hammered out, it seems likely that by 2012 we will always have access to at least 2Mbps broadband, wherever we happen to be. However, these connections are unlikely to be at all adequate by then: three years is an eternity on the Internet. For example, the BBC iPlayer only went live in December 2007, and it's already undergoing significant changes. Even more worryingly, Digital Britain says that the government has yet to see a case for legislation in favour of net neutrality, and there are apparently no plans for the government to invest in high-speed networks beyond BT and Virgin's existing proposals.

Taken together, that means two bits of bad news: there's going to be a digital divide between those of us lucky enough to live within BT or Virgin's high-speed networks and those of us stuck with mobile phone connections. There's also likely to be a two-tier Internet where ISPs use traffic management and other technologies to control what you can access - unless you're willing to pay a premium, of course. That applies to mobile connections, too: with the advent of 3G broadband and unlimited data access plans, mobile operators are already using traffic management to limit their customers' connections.

There's plenty more bad news where that came from. Mobile broadband is expensive, and if pricing is left to the network operators, the promised universal availability of broadband in the UK could be scuppered by excessive monthly or per-gigabyte charges, or by miserly bandwidth quotas.

Historically, mobile phone networks have charged as much as they could possibly get away with. The UK government turned a blind eye to this until the EU Telecommunications Minister threatened to beat the networks with a legislative stick. That's why international roaming charges for voice calls didn't come down until 2007, and it's why text and data roaming charges are finally falling now. In the Digital Britain report, Lord Carter talks about "reasonable" pricing for universal broadband. That's great, but his definition and the operators' definition of reasonable may well differ from ours.

Then there's the issues of censorship and surveillance. The government is currently considering legislation forcing websites to classify content so that ISPs can ensure children don't access them - something that was tried unsuccessfully in the US - as well as a single central database of all our communications data. Factor in Lord Carter's proposals that ISPs should be compelled to collect data on alleged copyright infringers so that entertainment firms can sue them more easily, and the future of the Internet in the UK appears far from idyllic. In fact, it looks rather like our creaking transport system: overloaded, prone to jams at the most inconvenient of times and under constant surveillance. Only Britain could take the idea of an information superhighway and try to turn it into the M6.

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