Creative, smart people from Yahoo!, MSN and Google recently met in Philadelphia to discuss search and what the future could be if they each had their druthers (fairly fancy word for the first sentence, I know).

Who thinks what?

• Google - "The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."
• MSN - users will use more lengthy and advanced search commands
• Yahoo! - social search that "democratises the notion of relevance and lets ordinary users decide what's important for themselves and other users."

A piece of info that I did not know prior to reading this article is that the "average search query is 2.3 words".... I need to find some good 0.3 words! (Seriously though, it's good to know that sort of detail when creating PPC campaigns. The tail is growing further away from the one-word zinger.)