Within the past few years it seems that there is always a buzz surrounding the audacity of some search engines actually wanting to profit from their existence. With Pay per click, pay for inclusion, and pay per impression advertising schemes integrated on most search engines - what is left for the optimization community to use?

All search engines start off seeking to provide one thing and one thing only - search results for their users. While the service that these search portals provide is invaluable to the millions searching on a daily basis, it simply does not make money. Having said that, who wants to be in the business of providing free information, and never making any money? Clearly, not the search engines anymore.

While it is great to know that engines are out there making some money for themselves, there is still much work to be done. The Internet is still far too young for the engines to pack their bags and simply believe they have done a great job providing search results.

Locating Content Types on the Net
Currently, the majority of search engines offer no way to seek out some of the most popular formats for files on the Internet. Sure, they can index HTML and similarly formatted document pages - but what about PDFs? Microsoft Word DOCs?

When the nature of Internet forces users to share information in a variety of file formats - the engines, if remaining true to their roots, simply need to do a better job in finding these types of documents, and providing them to user searches.

Frequently Updated Indexes
If there is news happening all over the world each and every second and documents are being uploaded, updated, and upgraded - why can't the engines go find them?

A study conducted by Search Engine Showdown shows us that even on the most popular search engines, like Google for example, the average age of a document within the index is one month old.

Now, put that information into another form… What good would the evening news be, if all you saw was what took place a full month ago?

Dedication to Search
One of the last things to point out today, is that search engines simply are not portals. Want an email address? How about today's weather and entertainment news? Sure, many people do - but not from the search engines.

Excluding Yahoo! (who built up around the portal frame since day one) search engines who try to become portals do so because they need the money that can be gained from advertising. Then, after a 6 month battle of that nature, their search results become grossly outdated, and they are nothing more than a memory.

From here on in, the true search engines need to be familiar with the fact that they are what they are. You can change, but not without the risk of losing large percentages of your audience.

Conclusions...
Obviously, the search engines have grown immeasurably since the concept of search was integrated into everyday surfers' lives. Too often though, we get caught up with what advertising Google has been using, when they might update, or perhaps how unsatisfactory results are from Inktomi.

If you want to see something changed in the search engines, put a constant pressure on them to do so - and do that all with good intentions. The engines, like the rest of us as web users, are all very young at this...

It takes time before things ultimately become the best they can be.