[jaguar]

Yes I agree sm, that was my last point however, trust me, I know a lot of people working on this stuff, it's still a long, long way off. There are already limited attempts at this that operate on google search, not that you'd know it most of the time but they also have a side effect.

At the moment searching for things on the web is still quite an art, it requires thought and careful structuring of a query that might include up to 10-15 variables subtracing words, forcing combinations, finding synonyms etc. When executed well you can really carve down your results to the good stuff. This kind of 'helper' software can get in the way and mess that up.

The other problem with that kind of second-guessing/automation is when it works, it rocks, when it doesn't it's a royal pain in the ass that wastes your time. It would have to be pratically bulletproof to be a net gain for a poweruser and that is a long, long way off.

Also, consider how much info about you google would need for that mate. That's quite a tradeoff in my eyes.

If I was going to sink money in online shares I'd do it in ebay and amazon, between them their infrastructure is running more and more of the web's e-commerce. Stores on ebay, Amazon is now running the ecommerce infrastructure for about 5 big UK firms and the trend looks set to continue. That's a powerful position.

Don't get me wrong, google could floor us all and take a position that would be pratically unstoppable but it's far from in the bag. The competition is getting better too, the new MSN search isn't all that shabby and gets a lot of traffic from default pages & dumb users and yahoo is making ground.