(Continued)     August 21, 2004 edition
Numerous studies have shown that most search results pages are ignored because few people look beyond the first 20 or 30 results. The reason you get back so many results pages you never look at is simply because Google, partly relies on keywords to work out what a page is about.

But the problem with keywords is that they are entirely free of context. So if you search for "prince" Google has no idea if you mean the tennis racket, tinned salmon, computer training or the pop star. But some search firms are going beyond keywords to put the context back and make looking for information less of a challenge.

Most of these approaches revolve around a companion program that sits on your PC and watches what you are doing and commits it to memory. "It's not based on keywords but on key concepts," says Kathy Rittweger, co-founder of search start-up Blinkx that has won a lot of publicity for its eponymous program.

So instead of doing the work of searching yourself you have a personal assistant that does the searching beforehand so everything is ready when you need it, she says.

In other news on Monday, if all went according to plans (and it didn't exactly!), Google was to be ready to start trading on Wednesday. Google said in a statement on its IPO Web site Monday that it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to declare the company's registration settlement effective Tuesday afternoon.

Such a move would pave the way for the company to set a price that evening. Google added that it would begin accepting bids as soon as one hour after the SEC declares the offering to be effective. If so, the company, seeking to raise $3.3 billion through its IPO, could have made its debut on the Nasdaq market Wednesday morning.

But Tom Taulli, founder of CurrentOfferings.com, an IPO research site, said that Google will not necessarily begin trading that soon. He said that once the SEC declares the offering effective, that simply means that Google is legally allowed to start selling shares.

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