The Web browsers are important to users and businesses all over the world. Changes on the Web landscape can affect many people and many businesses. Changes made to the core functionality of Web browsers can have dramatic effects for parties involved. Why are we saying this? The answer is JavaScript and its future as a Web programming language. Once upon a time JavaScript was a technology embraced by few, but today it is a programming environment powering, at least partly, much of the modern Web, as we know it, and almost all of the Web 2.0 flavored Web services. Web businesses all over the world rely on JavaScript to make their technology work.

Digital photography has taken off in a big way. Digital cameras are getting better each year. It is easier than ever to scan and convert old photos into digital format. Reasonably good digital cameras are affordable. Cell phones are often equipped with built-in digital cameras and they are getting better as we speak. The revolution in digital photography is having a huge impact on the Web and is a big chunk of what Web users and business people share among each other. Digital photos and digital videos is the kind of digital content that requires a lot of disk space to host and a lot of computing power to deliver.

Known phenomenon in sports, entertainment, politics and businesses is the comeback. Talking about comeback in programming language sounds strange, but can also be true. JavaScript is a programming language that for many years added spice to Web pages, but not regarded as a programming language to develop serious applications. This is dramatically changed.

We cannot live online without our bookmarks and we are not the only ones. Bookmarks are one of the fundamental elements of the World Wide Web. Bookmarks once had value and even a price tag. Bookmarks became directories or link lists. Bookmarks then became social and shared.

Virtual world turned into the real world equivalence. The World Wide Web is becoming local and perhaps more so than global and the global is coming near our lives. Satellite images of every rock, plant and house on the earth is within a reach. The biggest hurdle is if your connection is fast enough to download the streaming images.

It looks like everyone is publishing his or her predictions for 2007. We are going to jump on that bandwagon too. The reason is not that we have something to add to the great predictions and insights already written. The reason is we see the year 2007 as possibly the year that Web searching could advance to the next level.

The Web 2.0 revolution is starting to spill into Web search. Web 2.0 services have mostly been anything else but search. Truth be told, the hallmark of most of the Web 2.0 services we have used is low quality search. We have waited for up to a minute for search results to appear at some of the most popular Web 2.0 services, but things might be start to change in the near future.

Productivity is important and common sense to assume all companies, large, small and micro businesses, are looking for increased productivity. We aren't positioned to judge whether productivity has increased on a global scale with the arrival of the Web, but we assume it has. On the other hand we know that the volumes of productivity tools available as Web services have increased greatly.

The increased variety of available Web office productivity tools can only be good for us, the users. We already have many tools to choose from, of which many are free, and we can find solutions that fit our needs. Whether our data and documents are accessible from anywhere in the world or only via our desktop will be our choice, the consumer's choice. The company we select to host our valuable data will be our choice and if we can't find a company to trust with our valuable data then we can choose to host it on our own. The choice is ours and that is the most important thing.

Disruptive is a word used to describe some of the new Web 2.0 services and office productivity tools. The masters of disruptive technology and services are once again sending ripples over the Web with the announcement of a suit of applications for domains. Discussions over the Web are already very lively and the trend is to compare the suit to the world’s most widely used office productivity tools.

We have often written about the major search engines and how they need to improve. We have also discussed about how important it is for the webmasters to know which rules and guidelines they should follow. The majority of webmasters aren't trying to fool the search engines; they just want to have their Web sites indexed and findable. How they can do that without being mod rewrite experts or preventing their Web sites from falling into duplicate penalty traps or sandboxes is perhaps their biggest challenge and even bigger than the designing and making of their Web sites.

The Web is growing faster than ever before, or that is at least the general assumption. The Web is also an ever changing environment. Web sites are born and Web sites disappear from the Web's horizon. Web pages are created and added to existing Web sites and Web pages are deleted from servers and some are moved to new locations. The process of setting up a new domain and server is easy and it is even a lot easier to delete pages from a server. The whole process of adding and deleting files on Web servers is simply a piece of cake, but for some search engines adding and deleting files from their indexes isn't that easy and, in some cases, can actually take years.

Search engine is a simple concept in itself. Search engine allows a Web user to search its index of crawled Web pages and displays results accordingly. The Web started with one document, then two etc., Ten years later the Web was billions of documents and 15 years later it was tens of billions of documents. How can a Web user get sensible results when searching billions of documents for a word like "business"?

The first PCs ever made had only few colors available, 16 if we remember it correctly, based on red, green and blue or RGB. Computer users needed more and today we take millions of colors on our screens for granted. Going back to 16 colors is not an option for us. Ten years ago (when color resolution was still an issue) the search engines weren't as powerful as the large search engine are today and there were fewer technical issues to solve, but Web users had a variety of search engines to search for Web information. The search engine landscape was, perhaps, more colorful than it is today.

The freshness factor of any Web search engine is important. There are millions of new Web pages created daily that each deserves to be crawled, indexed and made available in search. There are probably more Web pages created daily that do not deserve to be crawled, indexed and made available in search. The criteria for which Web pages should be crawled, indexed and made available in search is nothing less than a puzzle for the large search engines to figure out, but why is it a puzzle?

There is an ongoing talk online about the Web's biggest and most popular search engines, but the talk is often about anything else than search. The search companies are constantly adding new Web services and coming up with new "innovations". The online media, including blogs, waits for the next product release or the next Beta service and discusses in what direction the search engines are going. There is one thing, in our opinion, that is missing: how to improve and advance search technology to help us, the users, get the best search experience and actually find the Web pages and information that make up the Web today.

The major search engines have the technology to identify new content, we all know that, but are they using it? Are we presented with the most recent content available online or do we get search results that are based on different things than freshness? The freshness factor may not be important if we are looking for an essay on Shakespeare. In that case we would be quite as well interested in a document created 20 years ago, but of course we would still be interested in newer documents and documents that are updated. However, the freshness should be a large factor when searching for information on technology.

Recently we have been taking a close look at the search engine industry. We have been taking a look at what is left of the "independent" search engines that were many some years ago and if there are any new players in the industry. It is staggering to browse through resource after resource and discover how few are left and how colored the entire Web search industry is with the major three search engines.

We have written many pieces about the major search engines and we are particularly interested in Google. Google has the biggest market share in search and is a dominating force in distributing or re-routing Web traffic and that is why 80 percent of our search pieces are about Google. The other major search engines, Yahoo and MSN, are of course very important and either one of them could become the next search destination for majority of searchers, but the present dominator in search is Google.

The development in Web technology is accelerating faster than ever. The latest talk, Web 2.0, could soon become obsolete and we can really expect something like Web 3.0 to come up soon. The development that started with Web 2.0 is currently the power behind new Web services and software.