Wired on Friday: The search world - and I mean that in the broadest sense of people searching the web - has been morphing into a whole new genre of late.

The early years of the internet economy saw websites which wanted to personalise the online experience, try to aggregate various types of services into the one page.

Thus it was that Yahoo! would allow you to see what the weather was like in Brussels and what news was breaking in Tokyo, and save that "feed" to your My Yahoo! home page.

Having the weather and the latest news on one page, although handy, was really a band-aid over the problem of having a slow internet connection. Surfing to several websites to find out the news and the weather separately would simply take too long download. Having the vital information on one page was thought to be a good idea.

This approach aggregated different states of "need", but in reality it is impossible to fit all the news or sport you really want on the one web page, because when you want to know the news, you don't just want five headlines on your My Yahoo! page, you want the full intravenous experience from News Google or the BBC.

The practise persists to this day, but few people hang around long enough to peruse it all, because they are usually soon off searching for something else.

And when people are out to search for something they want, to borrow a phrase, the full monty.

So it is that the search engine world is moving towards personalisation of a far higher order than the old days. It's literally "search on speed".

And one of the latest pushers of this new genre is Amazon, which has launched the A9.com search engine. Technically it is what's known as a "meta search" engine - it searches other search engines to produce results.

In a multi-column interface, A9 lists search results from Google, Amazon, the Internet Movie Database and GuruNet, the reference site. Clicking on any button in A9 opens a new column on the same page. A9 also makes use of the Alexa.com database which gives detailed info about almost any site - popularity, speed, reviews, and related websites.

The biggest draw with A9 is that you can hold a personal history, notes/diary, and bookmarks. A9.com also lets you know the last time you visited a website. And you can make notes on any web page.

This is possible by putting a cookie on your PC so the site remembers your preferences when you return. The interesting thing is that Google also knows everything you search on already via a cookie - they just don't allow you access to that information. But A9 does.

You can also download an A9 toolbar which can be installed inside your browser so you always have A9 to hand - but only if you have a customer account with Amazon. This is either pure evil genius or utter cheek depending on how you look at it. As a sweetener, A9 is cannily offering a 1.5 per cent discount on all Amazon.com shopping.

Personalisation clearly appears to be the next phase for search. Ask Jeeves has revealed its new personalised approach. You can save and organise your results and searches.

Ask Jeeves looks likely to also launch its desktop search application soon.

And just as Ask Jeeves was unveiling its new bells and whistles, Looksmart, a search provider to other sites, bought Furl.net. Just like A9 and Ask Jeeves, Furl - which is the older of the two - allows you to save text from web pages and annotate it. You get five gigabytes to save your search history.

So what next, after all these new toys? One direction may be collaboration. An Ask Jeeves executive has already said that being able to share your bookmarks held in the site with other people will be next. That way users can benefit from each other's findings, and the search engine itself becomes more powerful.

In fact, users collaborating to create online services and ratings systems is where much of this personalisation trend is heading. Online collaboration is as old as the internet, but most recently it has resurfaced in the world of blogging (online diaries).

The most notable collaborative system in blogging is "Trackback", whereby a blog posting on a particular topic can be referenced and compared to another on the same subject elsewhere. It's a kind of "distributed conversation" and it's exactly the kind of thing corporate enterprise systems in the grand-sounding "knowledge management" field have been trying to create for years.

But perhaps the best examples of this collaborative idea in action is http://del.icio.us, a "social bookmarks manager" which allows you to bookmark sites, categorise them and share your collection with others. The upshot is a site which shows what the world is looking at today and in lots of different topics.

It's a hobbyist, "open source" site, but a commercial application can't be far off.

Quite what will happen when sharing our bookmarks with each other becomes a more mainstream activity is anyone's guess. But the endgame might be a scenario where you enter your personal details into a search engine and it shows you what everyone who is similar to you is searching the internet for, second guessing what you are after before you've even looked for it.

Collaborative search tools like Furl aren't quite artificial intelligence, but they do create a kind of "hive mind" which will no doubt one day have political analysts poring over prior to elections.

Mike Butcher edits mbites.com