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Look for images of "Washington" online, and Google's search engine may turn up a random sea of pictures showing the Washington monument, the White House, George Washington, and actor Denzel Washington. Now Google's new "Image Swirl" feature could eliminate that hit-or-miss frustration by organizing images in neat, expandable thumbnail stacks for users to explore.

While the rest of the Web-savvy world fawns over breakthroughs in real-time search and pontificates on the future of social networking, Los Alamos National Labs is looking to the past. A team there is developing a "time traveling" Web browsing technology, dubbed Memento, that will allow users to find old versions of Web pages without trolling old archives.

When a government agency, medical office, or another institution scans a document and uploads it to a Web site, the images are not searchable -- they contain pictures of text, not the text itself. This is the so-called "Dark Web" -- its sinister-sounding name is just a reference to how difficult it is to search.

By some definitions, "Web 3.0" will be characterized by semantic mapping of data. Unlike regular searches which mine information based on keywords you type in, semantic search looks for information you want by connecting the meaning of words. Say, for example, you type in the word "cold." The way search engines like Google and Yahoo run now, you would get results based on the word alone. But "cold," like many words in the English language, is ambiguous and could mean anything from your health to the temperature.