From November 15th, the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, Spain, is offering the first Online Master in Search Engines. Students from Spain and Latin America are attending this program through the Internet, which is structured in five areas:
- Search engine fundamentals
- Search Engine Positioning
- Search Engine Marketing
- Technological surveillance
- Information Retrieval
Students attending the master may also participate in an online chat which will be moderated by a recognized leader in each area. From Dec. 6 to Dec. 12, the future of search engines is being discussed.
Some of the participants think that the future search engines will be vertical search engines, highly specialized in a certain subject, while others think that the future Google perhaps is now being developed by some student or group of visionaries in a dark garage, and that it wil have little or nothing to do with the way we search today.
Other issues like the difficulties that search engines find to correctly crawl and index Flash and AJAX websites are being discussed. Most participants agree that this problem is stopping the industry from widely adopt these high impact and interactive technologies.
The correct identification of what is being searched for when a search is formulated with casual language and a more intuitive and usable interface are some of the things that participant would include in a virtual letter to Google-Santa Claus.
What all this sums up to is that search engines are rising more and more interest in Universities and Business Schools all around Spain.
