For a little while now I've been using Google's SearchMash, an engine dedicated to universal or blended search- I know it's Google because of the privacy policy. Blended search is creeping into the vocabulary of optimisers as it provides a managed and (hopefully) relevant way to bring back results other than web pages.

It already exists, in part; Google "Guitar Hero" for instance and it should bring back a couple of video thumbnails in the first page. Those thumbnails sit quite happily within the regular web page results, and they're an example of blended search in action.

Now, go to www.searchmash.com to repeat the search. See the difference? No thumbnails. That's because it has dug out all the non-web page results and supplied them via the drop-downs on the right-hand-side of the page. There you can (currently) find sections containing Images, Blogs, Videos and Wikipedia entries.

If SearchMash were the brainchild of some trust-fund kids in Santa Barbara it would be little more than interesting, but as it has the weight of Mountain View behind it the suggestion is that this is the way search will be going. At the moment it is for all intents and purposes a beta, it spews the odd "Oops, we're busy right now! Please try again later" message and there are no geographic search options, no local search options, and little in the way of suggestive (or predictive) term filtering.

What I found fascinating was the many similarities SearchMash shares with the predictions of some SEO industry big wigs for the future of search engines. www.enquiroresearch.com produced the "Search Engine Results: 2010" paper. It explores what search engines may look like in the future, including personalization, universal search, eye tracking and interviews with leading industry experts- a document that is well worth a read (if a bit verbose).

There will be heavy reliance on AJAX to achieve the mashup required for blended search, but more interestingly, some of the 8 contributors may have a direct influence on the evolution of search engines.

...their predications make compelling reading for SEOs.