Techdirt writes about a start-up from Stanford with a new idea speeding up the page rank algorithm. Indeed this might be a helpful innovation by itself, but aspirations are stronger:

"Kaltix is a 'stealth mode' start-up...(leveraging) research done at Stanford University as well as several new technologies developed at Kaltix to provide large-scale personalized and context-sensitive search," a Kaltix representative.

My predictions about personalized searching are rather gloomy. Google has become such a nice marketing tool, both for sellers as for buyers in ranking search results. A more personalized search for general entries in the main index could risks this competitive advantage as the 'first page advantage' diminishes.